"Devil In Your Eyes" - MiniBoone
Energetic, crisply executed fun, filled with rhythmic dissonance, echoes of 1978-ish American new wave music, and large-scale harmonies falling somewhere on a line connecting Queen to Sparks (but not, to my ear, Animal Collective, as per some of the band's press). And hey I really like how effectively this shifts the mood from Hadestown's heavy-hearted tragedy even as it delivers a synchronistic lyrical alignment (which believe it or not I didn't notice until I'd already laid this week's songs out in order).
I especially love the guitars here. From beginning to end they play prickly, often rapid-fire chords that seem never to align quite with the melody either sonically or rhythmically. Listen, for instance, to the choked-neck sound you hear at the beginning, just past the organ opening: the engaging noise made by a guitar used more percussively than tonally. None of the actual notes that emerge jibe with what the song theoretically would want harmonically but the kinetic insistence of it becomes its own logic. The sound continues into the verse but note how the guitar steadily comes to life, the choked hammering giving way, around 40 seconds in or so, to fuller-fledged chord slashes that any music writer worth his or her salt would be tempted to call "angular" except maybe for how lively an atmosphere the band is churning up at this point. Typically, angular guitars are heard in a less flamboyant setting. One more example of creative guitar work comes in the chorus, when the layered harmonies take over center stage, pushing the guitar into making odd little offbeat exclamation points.
MiniBoone is a five-piece from New York City. "Devil In Your Eyes" is a song off the band's new EP, Big Changes, which was released at the end of January on Drug Front Records. MP3 via the band's web site.
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