Despite their accounts to have been playing together for fifteen years, Gauntlet Hair had their splash onto the scene timed a little too perfectly to have tackled this aesthetic. On their debut, the duo are sounding current, relevant, though not presenting themselves as a simply au courant act. It's uncommon for a project to attain such modernistic height without any novelty impeding upon it, but alas! To deem Gauntlet Hair a buzz-band would undermine the dense sonic makeup and keen songcraft of the nine tracks at hand.
Cohesion sits atop the totem pole, overlooking vocal-obscuring delay, pounding electronic drums, and exuberantly chiming guitars. The album's first three function almost as a triptych, sharing key and mood between one another while building upon the model with succession. The album is opened with hymnal hollers and rhythmically lashed chords on "Keep Time", while "Top Bunk" treks along a mesmeric groove in its bridge, and Gauntlet Hair's vocalist takes shape of Avey Tare, from his peculiar enunciation to his ear for melodicism. A palatable summation of the preceding forceful and adrift temperaments is found in the vicinity of "Mop It Up", with equal-handed dance-pop sashay and punk grit.
The tenor suddenly transforms on the following "My Christ", a steadily rocking number with an emanation of early 4AD singles, though laced through the band's established cavernous production. The album's most transient piece, "Overkill", scores a slapback-fed melody not unlike Skeleton-era Abe Vigoda along a heavy-handed rhythm section. Concluding the album is the stuttering "Shout in Tongues" which flaunts a hypnotic vocal refrain in its chorus before a return to the darker character of the opening tracks. As defined as their motifs are, Gauntlet Hair wrangle a multitude of flavors together, all of which comfortably ease into their formula.
Considering that much of its highlights reside at the very start, the album's incongruous sequencing hinders the momentum. Despite the front-loaded immediacy, Gauntlet Hair's less raucous counterparts compensate with adhesive, hum-prompting hooks and their consistently grandiose presentation. The project weaves together abstractions both pertinent in today's music circles and specific to themselves, which leaves us with a debut both rough and incomparable. Renovations are challenging to call for when there are so few setbacks to locate.
[Gauntlet Hair Website]
[Buy Gauntlet Hair from Dead Oceans]
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