caUSE co-MOTION!
It’s Time! Singles & EPs 2005-2008
(Slumberland)
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.
caUSE co-MOTION! perform Nov 9, Chop Suey, 8 pm, $10, all ages.
With Crystal Stilts, Meth Teeth, Woods.