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LP
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SMC 043LP
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After a wait of over three years since their last LP, Inspector 34's hotly anticipated follow-up to 2020's Love My Life (SMC 010LP) does not disappoint. Recorded by the band themselves, at a makeshift studio in a cabin in the woods, Squint Your Ears represents perhaps the group's most fully-realized artistic effort to date. Songs, riffs, and sounds ooze in and out of each other with wild abandon as Inspector 34, despite being ostensibly a fairly straightforward rock group, somehow defies classification -- only their own self-styled "junk rock" appellation seems vaguely appropriate. It's a sound full of contradictions -- simple and complex, loose and tightly angular, noisy yet somehow catchy. Songs flirt with a variety of diverse genres without ever falling solidly into one camp or another, shifting (or lurching dizzily) from knuckle-draggingly heavy to whimsically playful in the blink of an eye -- or an ear, as it were. Each one leaves the listener gasping for breath and anxious for more. RIYL: Pixies, Captain Beefheart, Pile, Sonic Youth, Polvo, Animal Collective, Pavement, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Ween, Pink Floyd, Elephant 6, Drag City.
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Cassette
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SMC 017CS
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So Low We Can't Hear You is the first live album from Lowell, MA's Inspector 34, as well as the first solo album from founder Jim Warren since the formation of the band's current line-up following 2016's Cuando En España. Its 34 tracks are sourced from a variety of live recordings made over a ten-year span from venues across the country. Presented as they are, simple acoustic performances with no overdubs, they showcase Warren's eclectic songwriting and the raw energy characteristic of his solo performances. RIYL: Daniel Johnston, Pat the Bunny, Pixies, Animal Collective, Neutral Milk Hotel.
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LP
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SMC 010LP
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Love My Life is the latest full-length album from Lowell MA's Inspector 34. With their Don't Worry This Is OK EP (SMC 004EP), Inspector 34 showed a wild capability to make a simple rock song big and boisterous, but Love My Life cracks the whole chestnut open, creating a gigantic universe to crawl inside and lie in. With a wide embrace of sound, the 13 songs on Love My Life emit faint whiffs from all types of American budget lo-fi records of the past 30 or so years, from Guided by Voices to U.S. Maple. And it's the variety that grabs you -- starting with the tripped out "Love" intro moving into the staggered groove of "Everybody," ribbed with delicate fuzz and a fizzy electronic exoskeleton somehow reminiscent of Animal Collective's Centipede Hz, the album ends with the mushing Akron/Family groove that boils over on "Ride the River of Light." In between, there's the sizzle of a "Thick Bologna" slice hitting your buttered frying pan in the cold morning before you lay it down on your morning biscuit, oozing out grease like the great Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919 -- it settles in your guts, a perfectly honed and stoned rocking chair groove. "My" slips in shortly after and wedges itself in between your brain and your mind as a solidified, rock tumor metastasizing the same way a Surfer Rosa joint would, clocking in at under a minute-and-a-half. "Grow Old" is a glacial grower, adding elements like ticking guitar parts, choral vocals, and guttural grime. It's a jungle of solid guitar motifs laced with a Sgt. Peppers kaleidoscopic wonderment similar to Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle. This is junk rock, sludge pop, indie rock for the apocalypse. Influences pop out sharply at times, but dissolve quickly; one minute you think you're in the bridge of an OK Computer B-side, the next you're submerged in a simmering fuzz tunnel with a set of limber guitar chords that titillate like no other this side of the Mississippi. Inspector knows their sound oozes from the space and lulling strums, never too bogged down, but wildly intricate like waves of sonic mercury. Love My Life is a noisy odyssey through a quantum field with mellowing currents of fuzz, coalescing into warm, phosphorescent pockets of self-portraiture.
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7"
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SMC 004EP
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The first full-band EP from Lowell MA's Inspector 34. With a healthy whiff of the same self-sufficient spirit as the '90s Drag City or Kill Rock Stars rosters, these four tracks are pinned together by sauntering, oddly distorted guitars tweaked with subtle effects and swooping, near-hawkish vocals that run in the same register as pre-White Stuff Neil Hagerty. Like Polvo with pinched nipples. Recorded live at Q Division Studios.
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