Album Review :: Beech Creeps - Beech Creeps

Beech Creeps

Beech Creeps

March 3 2015 (Monofonous Press)

8/10

Words: Linn Branson

Brooklyn’s Beech Creeps deliver a seven-track work here that is flagged up as an album, though these days it is often hard to tell when an EP becomes a mini-album, and when the latter becomes a full-on full-length. Seven tracks feels a bit on the 'mini' side, even though it does, admittedly, cover a fair 39 minutes - with almost nine of those minutes being taken up with just the opening track alone.

Produced at Brooklyn's Secret Project Robot by Jonathan Schenke Parquet Courts), there is something massively heavy to this self-titled debut from the trio. It feels weighty and meaty that is a rarity in today's rock scene; stoked by one towering tsunami wall of sound.

The epic splurge of 'Everybody Loves The Beech', with its hauntingly ominous opening, is for most part a crashing sonic white noise wall that strikes against a cacophony of drums. Its eerie dissonance is all you get for almost five minutes, until it slides into a different space altogether  of sweet guitar licks with Mark Shue's vocal coming in like a siren's call. It's a bit magical that bit.

Leading from that then into 'Teenage Boogie', it's like the kids gave grabbed the show from their older, prog-rock parents, and are burning up the fuel on a crash-bash of charging drums and guitars, with Shue's vocal here takes on a sharper pitch to the previous track. Former single cut 'Times Be Short' is a fuzzed out, wall-of-guitar jam with distorted bass and a hooky guitar riff over five-and-a-half minutes of chugging punk rock that rides on a wave of storming guitars and thumping rhythms - of which the last three-and-a-half minutes consist solely of, without vocals.

'Sun Of Sud' thrashes bass and electric guitar above and beyond a safe hearing level, sizzling in feedback above rockin riffs and a vocal howl pitched so high that you are flung upwards and hauled along with it. 'Arm Of The T-Rex' is another monster of a track, with a full weight of scuzzy guitar distortion battering its way around the vocal onslaught, where Shue even manages to impart a certain louche sexiness (check out the "sssss" at the end of "Rex"), like a viper in rockers' pants.

As the album opens on a lengthy whack in the chops, so the album closes on two six-minutes-plus'ers. 'On The Beech' displays its psych roots with low in the mix vocals which you struggle to hear, but perhaps that's not quite so important as the simple feel of the song - and the feel here is definitely a good one. While end track 'Long Walk Home' isn't so much a casual stroll as a hop-skip, jump and punch the air stride, punctuated by disorted wailing guitars.

'Beech Creeps' is like a wild untamed beast has been captured in a studio. You may not want to get too close, but you are mesmerized by its presence.