Hey, here’s an artist that I truly 100% found on Fuzz, having no prior knowledge of them beforehand. They live in Austria, a place where most people don’t expect to hear much about new music, but they’re well worth your time and attention.
As luck would have had it, I found them through a best guess match via Blip, the neat little Twitter-like audio application/conversation gestation creation now available in the navigation here on Fuzz. You enter in some keywords or the title of a song you’re listening to; Blip tries to find it, and presents a handful of options–the real thing, close matches and the like from a bunch of sources. Whatever I was looking for didn’t turn up, but a number of tracks by Bell Etage did, and since they didn’t have some sort of crazy name like ThEH FuNkY LoRdZzZ, they seemed worthy of notice.
Grateful for having checked them out, I now share the band Bell Etage with you, the Fuzzpublik. As a five-piece vehicle for singer-songwriter material in a young, poetic vein, Bell Etage struck me as pretty cool for two reasons: the overall restless rhythmic shakeup that’s present even in their calmest musical moments, and their use of blunt force, English-as-second-language lyrical delivery. The former owes a big debt to the bustling, anti-industry activity of ‘90s emo, as it separated into (and against) indie rock/pop ideas and its roots in hardcore. Listen to the snaking guitar lines and jagged wrong notes that pop out of a song like “A Drop of the Universe” and understand that not a whole lot of bands trying to play music this sincere and heartfelt actually have the control that these folks do in their attempt to strike such a balance. It speaks of time, experience, and the willingness to be different, all qualities that are shared by far too few acts out there. It’s redolent of a lot of ideas that usually don’t make it too far into songwriting showcases, and the fact that they can bring it across so naturally is quite remarkable. Their album, We Cried the Sunlight Down in the Day, is loaded with similar moments of wild surprise.
Onto the latter. Nobody’s ever expecting to hear someone singing seriously about masturbating in the opening verse of a song–and nobody really should–but it leaves “Feathers in the Washing Machine” with an uneasy feeling that carries right through to an almost immediate tempo shift to faster and more aggressive, hooky terrain. The dusky delivery of these words–odd ones at times, ones that don’t grasp a native subtlety–speak to a different set of rules. Their hustle is strong.
Anyone who likes Modest Mouse, Rainer Maria, Monochrome, any outfits of the brothers Leo (Ted or Chris, maybe even Danny) or the like really ought to check this band out. For playing within the boundaries of what we know to be an indie sound , Bell Etage takes a lot of chances. Those chances don’t translate to great work all of the time, but their yen for musical miscegenation, to weird things out in ways you wouldn’t expect, provide a bounty of real surprising, complex work that really helps to lift them up to the shoulder level of the faceless hordes out there.