Eat Skull - Wild And Inside

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Soundclips

4...according to our Brett on Wed 08 Apr, 2009.

Eat Skull's Wild and Alive is out now in all good record stores so let's review it! I didn't think these sounded like this, I thought they were all noisy and brutal because of the name but they're actually doing nice supertrebly hyperlo-fi slacker indie rock with echoey pedals and keyboards and they're very good at it thanks very much. Some bits remind me of Dinosaur Jr. and their early 90s US chumz, some bits remind me of The Jesus and Mary Chain pissed up and hangin' at the beach, some bits remind me of the messiest early Flaming Lips stuff, some bits remind me of Daniel Johnston, some bits remind me of really shit old Oi! bands but in quite a nice way. It's a shame I'm not being reminded of anything that really hits the nail on the head but if you cobble all that together you might have some idea of what's going on in this fine collection of brief songs.

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Steady on, April is gearing up to be the Heavy Hitting month of the year so far: A new lp from Eat Skull?? oh yes... one of our fave LPs from last year was their record on Siltbreeze...Eat Skull’s Sick to Death received worldwide accolades for its frantic pacing, unimpeachable lyric quality, and nugget after nugget of pop hooks buried under a gob of lo-fi muzz. On this follow-up, fans and critics will find a cleaner, more inimitable Eat Skull at work. Frontman Rob Enbom has outdone himself with both lyrics and structure on Wild and Inside, and the band as a whole rises to the challenge of nixing the lo-fi tag for a sound that’s less... antecedent. Gone is the wall of crud that prevents discerning listeners from identifying the instrumental play-by-play; in its stead, a set of crafted songs recall the paisley punk of The Last and the rural-delica of Great Plains, as well as nodding to the sanguine pop of early Flying Nun bands such as The Double Happys. Wild and Inside is a grower for the ages. It breathes deep and exhales perfectly. Look for Eat Skull at this year’s SXSW and trekking the world over throughout 2009. This is primo scuzz of the highest order, none of that limpwristed NME favoured crud, this does the job. Lo-fi wallof-crud sound replaced by a set of crafted tunes that take influence from the Paisley Underground, Midwestern psychedelica, and the early Flying Nun roster.
PRESS: “On their first album Sick to Death, the Portland, Ore., band Eat Skull mashes together almost everything that’s great about trashy art-punk, weirdo fuzz-garage, skuzzy punk-pop, Kiwi garage-rock and off-kilter bedroom-strum. ...once your ears adjust, you realize that it’s all killer, no filler.”—Pitchfork (8.3 rating)

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