It is the sound of a Brooklyn night that Religious Knives chases: a bag of green in the hand, rooftop hangs, leaning on the keys, leaving one place to go to the next. Over a handful of heavy releases, this outfit–now a quartet of guitarist Mike Bernstein and keyboardist Maya Miller, both of Double Leopards; drummer Nate Nelson of Mouthus; and recent addition Todd Cavallo on bass–has matured from a slurred, anxious drone into something much more relaxed, confident and fleet-footed, set against martial rhythms and repetitive, deep tonal anchorage. The group’s sole instinct seems to be how to treat these vibes and test them against time and conditions to impart the true, tangible core of the sounds they create with altered mood and hazy perception.
Resin, the first “studio” recordings of their quartet lineup, combines the tracks from an earlier 12” single, a handful of tour-only cassettes and CD-Rs and a few unreleased and live offerings. Sounds coalesce on Resin almost instantly, setting up a brocade of thick, aggressive stew for the drums to roil beneath on opener “In the Back.” Steadiness is key here, and what separates this track from, say, Sonic Youth’s first EP, is merely a matter of a few decades and some grittier production, but that’s not really the point. It’s somewhat of a foregone conclusion that nothing new is going to happen in any record you listen to. Religious Knives understands this, and instead works on the feelings that this music can impart–a disruptive dream state where safety and anxieties begrudgingly coexist–to leave the listener with a more lasting impression of their soundcraft. As Resin surges on, you’ll hear similar paeans to the Fall (“Everything Happens Twice” could have appeared on “Dragnet”, sans Procol Harum-esque organ solo), to the Doors (“The Sun” and both halves of “Twelve Bottles and One White Cone,” featuring No Neck Blues Band drummer Dave Nuss), and to the lonely-soul aspects of dub reggae (“Luck,” backboned with a haunting melodica lead). But overall you’ll discover a band that has exercised a great deal of control over this corner of music, and manipulates space, silence and headroom to create a profound state of being, lurching onwards with the weight of city life all across their shoulders, trying to alchemize it into Acapulco gold.
