Little Claw - Human Taste

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release

5...according to our Ant on Fri 11 Sep, 2009.

Bloody hell, what an amazing week for boss tuneage? How we gonna whittle the recomendations down this week i'll never know!! Little Claw are MY kind of band. A sleazy no-fi art garage racket of optimum quality, opener & title track sounding like Yeah Yeah Yeah's unplugged in a binyard after midnight, hollowed out & claustrophobic. I'm getting high with these spidery tendrils of neo-gothic guitar on next track 'Frankie' arguing with low down walls of fuzz and primal drums whilst this odd feller bellows his shit, all echo laden, off-kilter & possessed. Though throughout this cracking album, the vocals are mostly unleashed atonaly & wonkily by this lass who rides the seedy, nihilistic shimmery scrawl with knowing abandon. Musically I'm struggling for reference points, they're one of those weird, wired, messy, fascinating & slightly unhinged bands that give you the jitters but keep you totally addicted, muddy pop structures spring out at you, popping through the grimy melee, screaming for help before being dragged back into the chaos, some of the monotone, scratchy guitars reminding me of smacked out gothy bands like dustDEVILS but there's a post-punk/no wave heart here, throbbing with creativity & cheeky menace. Human Taste offers proper sinister fun for all the family (creeps) CD on Ecstatic Peace, vinyl on Not Not Fun.

"Little Claw, jesus...what can you say? Too much for Michigan's mirror, they shifted ass to Portland Oregon (land of JOMF, Smegma, Meltzer and so much more) in order to stew their mushrooms in relative peace. They're the only band I've heard that seem capable of tapping into the indescribable art-raunch wobble of Leesa Aldredge, watch them and tremble." Byron Coley Little Claw was born in Detroit, Michigan during the Great Eastern Seaboard blackout of 2003…having nothing to do, nowhere to go, Heath Heemsbergen and Kilynn Lunsford began playing their acoustic guitars and singing into the darkness. An auspicious beginning to be sure… Even now, Little Claw are still strumming and screaming into the void. Formed originally with Jamie Easter from the Piranhas on drums, the band played a string of shows, starting with their debut performance with legendary Ohio art-punks the Bizarros, which then led to the recording of the first Little Claw LP with Warn Defever (His Name Is Alive) The album was released by Ypsilanti records in 2005. Jamie left the band in the summer of 2005 and after one show as a duo, Hendrik Deherder joined up on the drums. A second LP was recorded with Matthew Smith (Outrageous Cherry) in his Hamtramck living room mid-2006 and was subsequently released by Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label in 2007. Later that year, there was a release of a split 7" single with Michael Yonkers on X! records. Little Claw's move from the urban nightmare of Detroit to the more subtle cloudy terrors of Portland, Oregon prompted some more augmentations to the line-up: Adam Svenson (of Seattle improv band Du Hexen Hase) took over the caveman beat on the drums, freeing up Henrik to bang the synth and add additional percussion. On the road and on recordings, the Little Claw sound is graced by the touch of Toledo native, Damon Sturdivant (Puffy Areolas, Tyvek) on additional percussion and synth. "But what do they sound like anyway? They sounded like the greatest godammned fucking band on the planet the time we saw 'em. Two minimalist drummers, a guitar dude with a nice underhook rhythm rip and a girl with a badass no wave slather tongue tearing hell out of her slide guitar given half the chance. And not all hellbent rage either--some nice licorice melt drizzle crud groove too. Fuckin' awesome." Thurston Moore. track listing: 1/frankie 2/frozen in the future 3/modern vampire 4/lay to waste 5/colors you drown 6/slow sticky tornado 7/summerphile 8/breathing tape 9/golden boy 10/human taste (below the tide)

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