Austinist Album Reviews: Growing, Fol Chen

Image from Allmusic

Another day, another quasi-ambient foray into staticky rhythm loops and guitar and synth bloops for these Brooklyn-via-Olympia weirdos. For noise aficionados not familiar with Growing’s ouevre, the trio could best be described as Black Dice-lite - not as aggressive or beat-heavy, but definitely in the business of creating grimy, post-21st century digital psychedelia. Another Black Dice parallel: while earlier albums were based in more obviously-guitar-centered drones, which could go on for ten minutes or more, the newer material is concise and to-the-point, resembling mutant, Cronenberg-ian reformations of the three-minute pop song. By design, this music has a relatively narrow appeal - still it’s always nice to see this kind of thing blasted into the nether regions of mainstream consciousness via a trendy label like Vice. They are probably huge in Japan.

Growing: [website]

Image from Allmusic

Hot on the heels of 2009’s Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made, L.A.’s masked quartet drop another long-player of glitchy pop deconstructions. Fol Chen traffic in the sort of sample-and-chop method of composition that has grown a bit tired over the past few years - there are only so many times you can be amazed by the sound of an acoustic guitar chopped into microseconds and spliced every which way. Thankfully, the band knows their way around a solid hook - indeed, the heavily-processed sound of New December tends to serve the songwriting quite well, especially on the marshal attack of “They Came To Me,” although occasionally the album lapses into meaningless digital hiccuping. We eagerly await the unveiling of Part III’s subtitle - With A Vengeance?

Fol Chen: [website]