PRICE:
$18.50
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Squint Your Ears
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
SMC 043LP SMC 043LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
8/16/2024

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.