Records of the year: Sharpie Crows: Mass Grave/Golf Course

Firstly: Mass Grave/Golf Course is a phenomenal name for an album; conceptually, syntactically, juxtapositionally, comedically; it just works. It somewhat spoils the party when you understand that Mass Grave and Golf Course are the names of two separate EPs, but if you download one from their Bandcamp page, you get the other bundled in. Hence: Mass Grave/Golf Course. Besides, the artwork all but confirms it.



Cursory listens to older material show the Crows have made a leap into leftfield, swimming forcefully out of the shallows of vaguely garage-y post-punk and into a deeper ocean pitched in the weirdnesses of the San Francisco scene of the early '80s, some Texas art-trash, and perhaps the spirit of countrymen such as The Dead C and The Clean (if not their actual sound). This might sound tenuous and idiotic, but let me try this on paper: the accent and vague 'experimental' tendencies make Liars the first point of comparison, but they do not sound like Liars. However (and this is the big leap of faith) - it sounds like something Liars might attempt in a parallel universe, were they suburban rather than cosmopolitan.

When the band 'rock' they sound more than fine: you imagine that live, they would be completely unhinged. However, it is their slower, more expansive material that satisfies more completely: 'Communist Girls' is the sound of stumbling home, the air hitting the drunken in a burst of badly-directed anger, frustration and bullshit ("do you know what I did today? / I fucked a head of state today.") before arriving home and sobering regretfully. Better still is 'Country Music': airlocked, disembodied, and full of disquiet. "How can we make country music / when there's no country anymore?" they ask, sounding as if they genuinely want to know.



What the album signifies, more than its own excellence (which it absolutely is: consistently across 11 tracks) is the triumph of the democratised unsigned act. Everything is self-generated: the art, the recording, the image and thus retains 100% of its intended characteristics; the band as true auteur.* They'll probably never tour outside of their own continent, but at least we can hear them as quickly, freshly, and in context as their local fans can. The album costs about £2.30/$3.80US. Whether 'the Radiohead model' works for smaller bands is yet-to-be-proven, but at least they can compete musically.

*I know, this has happened for years - but now on microscopic budgets it sounds as good as records you buy in the shops that cost five or six figures to make, ordinarily.