Artist: Sic Alps
Album: Napa Asylum
Release Date: January 25
Label: Drag City
Tracklist:
01 Jolly
02 Eat Happy
03 Cement Surfboard
04 Country Medicine
05 Do You Want to Give $$?
06 Saint Peter Writes His Book
07 Zeppo Epp
08 Trip Train
09 Ball of Fame
10 Ranger
11 My My Lai
12 Wake up, It’s Over
13 Meter Man
14 Occult Display
15 Wasted at Church
16 Turtle Soup
17 The First White Man to Touch California Soil
18 Super Max Lament on the Way
19 May Ltd
20 Low Kid
21 March of the Skies
22 Nathan Livingston Maddox
Notes: Psychedelic noise-rockers followup their 2008 full-length U.S. EZ with this set.
By Josiah Hughes
Lo-fi garage pop trio Sic Alps followed a string of singles with their excellent breakthrough album U.S. EZ in 2008. Since then, the band have slowed down significantly on the recording front, instead opting to stay on the road. Now, they’ve finally laid down a new LP for release early next year.
According to a press release, the album is called Napa Asylum and “represents the years when they slowed way down and took a minute to reflect.” The release describes the record as “a fresh assortment of Sic pleasures, echoing half-emptily as the hooks slide into your flesh, animating you in marionette-style you to tip-tap your way across the dance-floor. Get your steps in while you can, the songs are as short as they are bitter-sweet.”
If you’re worried they’ve upped the production ante, however, fret not, as the press release assures that, like all of the Sic Alps recordings, Napa Asylum was made with just “a delay pedal, reverb tank, two microphones, $100 preamp and Tascam 388.”
Sic Alps will release Napa Asylum on January 25 via Drag City.
Napa Asylum is the SIC ALPS in 2010-two and one half years since the fabled release of US E.Z.! Napa Asylum accounts for the swift tilt of time with twenty-two crafted tracks bubbling in the reverb tank. The Alps are in the summer of their years, where they suddenly find a minute to reflect on the breaking down of the years previous. Napa Asylum is overfull with Sic pleasures, echoing half-emptily like they do as the hooks slide into your flesh, animating you marionette-style to tip-tat your way across the dance-floor. Themes from Napa Asylum include re-incarnation, magic and schizophrenia. The process is the flavor-and three albums in, you can still get in on the ground floor, ’cause Sic Alps always record in the basement. Get down your steps while you can, the songs are as short as they are bitter-sweet. But the one that ends just makes way for the one coming next. No Export To Europe.
By Jennifer Kelly
Sic Alps, out of San Francisco, has picked up a new member and a new label since their last release, U.S. EZ, in 2008. The new member is Noel Harmonson, previously best known as the echo-plex guy in Comets on Fire, and the new label is Drag City, but fear not, there is not much either of Comets on Fire’s amp-fueled insanity, nor of Drag City’s freak folky strumminess, in this two disc vinyl extravaganza. In fact, if anything, I’d say Sic Alps has drifted a bit further from folksiness, a bit closer to pop with these 22 tracks. Where U.S. EZ was studded with primary-colored campfire songs, a la “Gelly Roll Gum Drop,” the new Napa Asylum (Drag City) veers into Beatles-esque pop fantasies like “Saint Peter Writes His Book” and “Meter Man” which, but for a certain amount of fun-house mirror distortion and woozy echo, could fit onto a Nuggets comp.
Like U.S. EZ, Napa Asylum feels raw and unfinished, its songs sketched in broad magic marker strokes, rather than carefully shaded and cross-hatched. There’s a liminal quality to many of these tracks, as if we are catching them in the act of turning into songs rather than as finished works. That makes prolonged listening somewhat difficult and tiring, as you are continually asked to fill in the blanks between what’s on the disc and what a given track might become. However, it also opens up a limitless sense of possibility. These songs are portals into a freakishly lighted, semi-surreal experience that never quite accords with what you expect.
The song-like tracks are interspersed with noisier, less structured bits, chaotic “Trip Train,” for instance, sandwiched between breezy, skewed Citay-ish “Zeppo Eppo” and Woods-like “Ball of Fame.” Moments of real, though non-standard beauty, like dream-fuzzed “Wake Up It’s Over,” float up like mirages out of a clashing, clattering confusion, all the more lovely for their junkyard surroundings. I’m not sure that Sic Alps really had enough material for a 22-song, double-disc fourth album, but there are some gems here, taking shape even as you listen and turning into strange and beautiful little episodes that are almost, but not quite, pop songs.