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What
is it with super Utah bands and the cold shoulder they
seem to be receiving from the extreme underground?
Listening to this split release between Salt Lake City’s
Xur and Mich!gan I am in awe as to how good these two
bands are and how no one outside of their circle seems
to know about them. I didn’t know about them until like
a few days ago and considering how good these songs are,
that just shapes up to be a crime of some sort.
Xur are up
first with three tunes, the genre they’ve chosen is pretty much
like soup du jour these days, every shop seems to have
one for a pretty good price. Yes, the fact that they experiment
in the same way that Neurosis and Isis have been experimenting
for years doesn’t help. That could be a detriment in these days
when every other band aspires to the same grandiose sounds. And
the fact that Xur hasn’t put anything else out since 2007 might
also help them stay in obscurity. But ignoring that, their
three tunes are excellent; massive tracks with sprawling and
earth swallowing riffs, very potent throaty screams, a few
samples and that impending sense of doom only truly dangerous
music has. Where is the new stuff? New songs? Their MySpace page
says nothing about them.
On the other
hand Mich!gan seems just as elusive. And with a moniker like
that it’s equally hard to find even their MySpace page. The
label’s website doesn’t give much info either. Mich!gan’s style
is much more spastic; there is a math metal element to their
formula, the frequent tempo shifts, the broken rhythms the
incessantly herky herky motions and the hardcore-laden vocals.
Like their genre calls for, their half of the split is much
shorter, but is equally powerful, especially when the songs fall
into a groove, regardless of how short those grooves are.
“Quick Look Busy God is Coming” is quite cool, at times heavy,
at others psychedelic and at others infused with totally post
hardcore broken moods. Good stuff. Just, you know, like, get
together, record some more tunes and at least pretend to make
the effort by including some valuable information in your
MySpace and shit.
XurMySpace
Mich!gan MySpace
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