Music

Fucking in the Streets

Born Anchors Drop New Album Sprezzatura at the Cha Cha

by Eric Grandy

Sunday night at the Cha Cha was kind of an odd choice for Seattle trio Born Anchors' record-release party for their new album, Sprezzatura. Not because the Cha Cha, under the watch of sound guy/show manager/Aviation Records proprietor Kerry Zettel, isn't a fine place to see a show—it is, like a punk-house basement show with a full-service bar and cantina attached—but because of the rest of the night's mismatched bill (apparently Born Anchors kind of hopped onto an already-booked show, but still).

L.A.'s Go West Young Man and Seattle's Hallways opened, and both bands plied rootsy, bluesy rock rather at odds with Born Anchors' brand of late-'80s-vintage post-punk. Go West Young Man's songs were the brighter and more upbeat of the two, marked by muted trumpet and the occasionally fried guitar solo. Hallways stuck to slow-moving, country-inflected balladry (for some reason the beginning of each song sounded like it might turn into a cover version of Stone Temple Pilots' "Creep"); keyboardist/singer Stephanie Parrish's vocals were often indistinct, while lead singer/guitarist Grant Burton's were of the "soulful" yarling variety (ameliorated none by the lyrics—one chorus rhymed a line about putting love to the test with the conclusion that said love was not second-best). Backing the headbanded-and-feathered duo (can we be done with the hippie/native/freak-folky fashions already?) was a standard rhythm section and a multi-instrumentalist who played saxophone, banjo, and pedal steel with a substantial array of effects pedals. Maybe they would've been better in some other context, but they just made the wait for Born Anchors drag on.

About Born Anchors, a few of the bands brought up by folks at the show attempting to pin down the trio's sound: Killing Joke, Fugazi, U2, the Cult, Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Some of these are probably more apt than others, but all of them help point toward a certain era of post-punk/hardcore indie rock and power pop from which Born Anchors do draw heavily. Live, the band demonstrate a knack for combining disparate momentums—frontman Jason Parker's rumbling bass grooves, Gregory Scott's shimmering, echoing guitar lines, Justin Martinez's hard-pounding drumming—into a unified whole. Martinez, especially, is a pleasure to watch, a perfectly tight and heavy-hitting drummer with a wicked mustache, but the whole band is energetic and on-point (on one song, the group dropped everything except a looped guitar line and all jumped back in with a great, breaking crescendo). Parker's vocals were slightly drowned out by the band's muscular sound, a problem Born Anchors don't have on the cleanly produced Sprezzatura.

At nine songs in 27 minutes, Sprezzatura is a concise blast of an album, easily played in a single set. "In Disguise" and "Cascading" are its most immediately catchy songs; the former is tense and new wavey, the latter buoyant and rocking, both powerfully propulsive. It's not a flawless record—Parker's vocals can veer into bombast at times, as on "Casualty," and the lyrics aren't always as memorable or as moving as the band's instrumentals—but after a few listens, Sprezzatura is starting to seem like a pretty promising debut.

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