Also reviewed:
Whatever Brains’ Mt. Whatever 7″
(Bull City Records)
In the half-hour it takes to hear Whatever Brains’ Soft Dick Citya spray-painted, cassette-only release bookended by a screeching Urinals cover and a Johnny Cash sound-collage sabotagethere’s little question what this Raleigh quartet is about: This is a band that can’t sit still. From The Urinals homage and the Johnny Cash sacrilege to the hooky-and-hissy space between, raw enthusiasm comes tied together with jagged and noisy interludes.
Within that jittery impatience and irreverent ruckus, witness a consistency of style that’s not just uncommon but mostly unknown for such a new band. And Whatever Brains has done it twice now. Just as Soft Dick City feels spontaneous in its noise and spittle-lipped in its urgency, the subsequent Mt. Whatever 7″ feels self-assured and somehow meticulous in its relative professionalism.
The three tracks that comprise Mt. Whatevertwo of which, the title track and “Summer Jammin,” are reprised from Soft Dick Citycome out cleaner, which is to say less shrouded in feedback, but no less excitable. On the 7″ version of “Mount Whatever,” cooed vocal harmonies turn to roars behind Rich Ivey’s snotty snarl (Ivey is a contributor to the Independent Weekly). Jagged guitars spike harder, but with less static. It sounds no less primal than on the tape, where a droning rumble cloaks the song, making it rough and rowdy. The no-fi charm and noise-fueled unification of Soft Dick City is exhilarating, but the same holdsjust in different waysfor Mt. Whatever‘s half-polished fits. The tape trades undulating feedback and squelching electronics for the single’s basic guitars-bass-drums setup. Neither suffers the exchange.
Taken together, these two releasesboth issued on formats you may consider obsoleteare defiantly good but defiantly inaccessible for mass markets. Just 500 copies of a 7″ and a handful of cassette tapes remain as the lone artifacts of the band’s existence to date. This is the sort of sticky stuff that could be huge, though (we’ve called these Brains “Raleigh’s best new band,” and we’ll echo that here). Collectors and early listeners are rewarded, then, with two very different but complementary releases, each of which keeps its best trackSoft Dick City‘s “Swhatever” and Mt. Whatever‘s b-side, “Crass Ringtones”proprietary and isolated. This is the stuff from which anthems, legends and eBay auctions come.
What functions as a two-part debut shows Whatever Brains to be a band born fully formed, a more prickly and brash cousin to Ivey’s defunct Crossed Eyes, but with a similar foundation on pop-structured punk. Indeed, it’s Whatever Brains’ greatest virtue that, behind the din of scorched amps, shattered chords and snot-rocket singing, there’s a gooey bubblegum center charged with immediacy and drunken abandon.
Mt. Whatever has just been picked up by Matador’s distribution wing, so get your hands on the vinyl now.
