Customer Reviews

In Hospitalable

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The much underated Beatnik Filmstars pulled all the tricks from their bag with this one. "In Hospitable" takes you for a ride through Dayton, Ohio with their own version of "Motor Away" by Guided By Voices.( except for different lyrics) to there homeland of jolly olde England with their splendid song "It's a Nice Place for a Holiday". Thier sarcasm of American culture in "Buffalo Bill Style Haircut" gives this album 5 stars automatically.

One of the things I love most about In Hospitalable is how it ricochets between different tempos, textures and moods.

Sure the washes of noise guitar and trebly effects are constant throughout much of the album. But they still mix it up with electronic warbling, blips-and-bleeps, looping and other textures ("Geiger Water Deep," "0, Minus 16, Minus 3, 0," "Footstands"), and even an organ on one track ("Skiving in Mono").

My favorite tracks are the most energetic and upbeat ones:

There's the laid-back and playful songs about slacking around with friends -- "My Incident Free Life," "Is This is Rad?" and the like...

...and then there's the catchy, grinding, percussive cuts like "Hep Boys (Into Krautrock)," "Buffalo Bill Haircut," "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," that somehow keep their structure intact behind the layers of tinny, scratchy guitar noise...

...punctuated by the infectious energy of angular, spastically propulsive tracks like "Ransack the Misfits" and "Mess."

And the slower, more introspective pieces, like "Skiving in Mono," "0, Minus 16, Minus 3, 0" and "Fracture," offer nice interludes between the thrashier tracks.

But don't let my verbose review put you off -- Beatnik Filmstars don't take themselves too seriously and they sound like they're having a hell of a lot of fun on this album.

If you like noisy, sloppy, oblique indie rock then you'll like Beatnik Filmstars.