Spectreview: Versing – 10000

-DEEP PINK-

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“You curse my name
But these things aren’t the same
It’s obvious”

Think about the Big Rock Bands of the last decade, and how they earned their breaks essentially by siphoning a sound from a classic original artist and painting that sound in a fresh light. Kevin Parker’s bottled John Lennon, Adam Granduciel’s Dylan-like rasp, even Greta Van Fleet’s blatant Led Zeppelin cosplay: recalling an artist at their peak induces not only nostalgia but a strange potentiality, a perverse rewriting of history. Versing sound explicitly like a lot of indie-to-indebt late-80’s acts (Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr.) but Sonic Youth is the band you’d most likely call to mind once you hear Daniel Salas’ relaxed vocals. Where that band evoked the washed-out, trash-laden streets of New York, the Seattle four-piece bring a distinctive West Coast shine to their artful, melodic noise. 10000, their latest, is built by captial-S Songs, not necessarily verse-chorus-verse templates but controlled compositions with moving parts, and while that structure differentiates the album from the sudden blasts of chaos or total sense of immersion that hallmarked works like Daydream Nation or Isn’t Anything, it lends both an accessibility and a modernity to those classic sounds. Surprisingly, Versing are hard to pin down completely, which signifies the thought put into these tracks. There are straightforward throwbacks (“Tethered” could have been written by Thurston Moore himself for Rather Ripped, and “Offering” shudders with Kevin Shields’ iconic whammied chords) but then there are moments like “By Design,” a slow-paced stomper baked in California sunshine (early Weezer’s uncomplicated riffage in the verse, Red House Painters’ glimmering chords in the coda) and the soft and sprawling “3D” that delineate the band’s knack for reimagining their influences. It’s all a little on-the-nose, but there are much worse acts to pull from for this kind of music, and 10000 provides just enough of a step forward to make the band’s future output even more anticipated.

Recommended for the throes of autumn.