caUSE co-MOTION!
It's Time! Singles & EPs 2005-2008
(Slumberland)
recommendedrecommendedrecommended 1/2

A singles comp doesn't have to operate like an album. Rather than something you want to sink into for a while, it's something you play so as to be rapidly bombarded—especially if it's a comp by a cheap-sounding guitar outfit, where bombardment is already the focus. Even better is if it's good and concentrated, like this 14-song, 21-and-a-half-minute "album," which resembles last year's Imagine the Shapes on What's Your Rupture?—a collection that also featured caUSE co-MOTION!

Who, besides fans of punctuation and random caps lock, are caUSE co-MOTION!, anyway? As a fan I'm tempted to ask back, "Who cares?" After all, the group plainly wants us to imagine them as racket- making dust mites found randomly in some squirrelly corner of the great anonymous basement in the great anonymous indie-art-punk-pop-whatever suburb in the sky. But the truth is simpler than that: The band are four young, obviously eager guys from Brooklyn who go by first names only on My- Space (Arno, singing and guitar; Alex, guitar; Liam, bass; Jock, drums) and make an awfully nice, truncated racket informed by turn-of-the-'80s homemade post-punk but still sounding, somehow, like itself.

Take "I Lie Awake," which basically alternates between a riff that clangs and some lead playing that's like a soliloquy recited on creaking stairs; Arno sings in a semimonotone somewhere between desperate and leave-me-alone. That's It's Time! as a whole: "Only Fades Away" and "Baby Don't Do It," the first two tracks, distill punky heartbreak into just over three minutes combined. It's record-collector rock, all right: You'll definitely have more fun with It's Time! if you know where their roots lie. But you don't have to know anything to like it, or them. recommended

caUSE co-MOTION! perform Nov 9, Chop Suey, 8 pm, $10, all ages. With Crystal Stilts, Meth Teeth, Woods.