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$11.99 CD
$14.99 LP+MP3
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NAOMI PUNK
The Feeling
(Captured Tracks)
 "Voodoo Trust"
"Trashworld"
From my work over at Still Single, evaluating much of the glut of vinyl releases that trickle out of the underground economy, only a few things have become evident with regards to standards in modern music. One of the most important things is figuring out where the local music scenes are thriving as others have flagged, and there's three answers I'd readily give out: the continent of Australia, and the American cities of Austin, TX and Olympia, WA. The latter is nine times out of 10 where the ingenuity of punk rock meets the standards of a relatively egalitarian community. In the past few years the city has spawned Milk Music, Hysterics, Broken Water, Cairo Pythian, Weird TV, Christian Mistress, Bone Sickness, HPP, Gun Outfit, Sex Vid, White Boss, Son Skull ... and they are/were all great, working consistently within one genre or skirting several with a personality missing from most of the things I get to hear. I'm sure there are lousy bands there, but I haven't found very many. There's a paper in that town called NUTS! which chronicles the goings-on of music and art folks, and it paints the city as some sort of utopia. Which, in a way, it is. A six-block, super-twisted utopia that is intractably strange in the way that only a town with the musical/misfit legacy it bears can be. Anyone interested should go and visit.
And with that, you should take notice of Naomi Punk. The Olympia band came to our attention after a handful of DIY shows in town over the summer; soon after, their debut album The Feeling was picked up from its initial pressing on the Couple Skate label for wider release by Brooklyn's Captured Tracks. What a move! This group plays close to a formula that reveals itself to be more of a language between its members, where it in turn has sculpted their ability to play out of the needs the language has bestowed upon them. And if I explain it to you, it's not going to sound like a lofty goal, for the nuances of this language are buried in what seems to be a trick. Much of Naomi Punk's music is slow, with big riffs and well-paced, grand-wingspan style drumming. It is loud and not rendered in the highest fidelity, so much so that you may strain to pick out what they're singing. But there's one element missing from that description: heaviness. There may be some residual "heavy" (like Thrones-style heaviness) in their genetic makeup and musical backgrounds, but there's not a distortion pedal in earshot here. So these big loud riffs get to ring out cleanly and in their plodding, infectious order, the heaviness is mitigated, making all the energy they've expended rain back down on the listener. There's a busted, tweaky synth in there somewhere, a lot of cymbal crashing, and a sick rasp of vocals that sound out in rebellious triumph, but since it's not heavy in a traditional sense, we're forced to instead focus on these things. It feels like a march, at first like a Pixies record at 16 RPM, or Times New Viking imitating the Melvins, until the album's motif fully takes hold. It plays like ocean waves crashing against you, waves that match their intensity with their grandeur. That's the best way to describe how The Feeling has made me feel, and may make you feel, too. This sort of approach may not be able to sustain interest if stretched to career length, but for right now, it works incredibly, better than all but a small handful of new music I've heard in 2012. [DM]
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