Album of the Day 2/10/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Thursday’s album is #719:

Norden Bombsight – Pinto

Norden Bombsight are not the shortest-lived band on this list, but they’re a contender. The Brooklyn band lasted roughly two years, played maybe two dozen live shows, shot a video and then broke up in the fall of 2010. Before they did, they made this scorching, menacing art-rock record, a hallucinatory, shapeshifting blend of early 1970s art-rock and psychedelia with gothic flourishes. Guitarist David Marshall hammers out wild tremolo-picking and anguished David Gilmour-style sustained lines against keyboardist/singer Rachael Bell’s funereal organ and piano while bassist Jonathan Gundel twists upwards like a snake over the hypnotic, careening gallop of drummer Julian Morello and percussionist Derrick Barnicoat. The album opens with the distant shriek of a garbage truck with the aptly titled Never to Be Seen Again. The nightmare expands with the surreal Four on the Lawn, gets lush and Procol Harum-esque with Help Desk and then echoes Pink Floyd on Other Side. “Side two” is a suite: the anguished Siouxsie-esque lament Raven (the only song to ever commemorate West Haven, California) is followed by the southwestern gothic epic Snakes, the savage Altercation, the Grateful Deadly murder ballad Virgil and then the ornately shuffling, funky Water Song. And then it’s over. The band breakup was an amicable one; whatever configuation these musicians end up in is worth keeping an eye on. The whole album is still streamable at the band’s reverbnation site.

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CD Review: Norden Bombsight – Pinto

One of the challenges of writing about music is to be quick enough to spot a genuine classic when it appears. This is one of them. Raw yet ornate, ferocious yet intricate, Norden Bombsight’s debut album Pinto hails back to the early 70s but adds a snarling, desperate punk edge that’s uniquely their own. It’s sort of the missing link between Pink Floyd and Joy Division. It’s art-rock, but it’s not prog; it boils over with anguished intensity, but it’s not goth. The current band they most closely resemble is New York gypsy-punk-art-rockers Botanica. Guitarist David Marshall plays with a raw, vintage 70s tone that enhances his unhinged, fiery attack on the strings over the nimble, melodic, shapeshifting rhythm section of Jonathan Gundel on bass, Julian Morello on drums and Derrick Barnicoat on percussion, loops and processing. Frontwoman Rachael Bell holds down centerstage with a savagely beautiful, wounded wail, adding starkly eerie keyboard textures as well as incisive mandolin. Norden Bombsight’s lyrics match their music, fragmented, ominous and disquieting. This is an after-dark album, one that resonates best by the light of a distant streetlight, or no light at all.

Like a vinyl record, it has a side one and a side two, each of them a suite. Side one opens with a dark, stately three-chord progression, the backup alarm on a garbage truck screeching evil, mechanical and assaultive in the distance, building to a desperate gallop and eventually back again, evoking late 70s noir art-rock cult favorites the Doctors of Madness. The song segues into Four on the Lawn, a feedback loop fading up to Bell’s accusative, Siouxsie-esque vocals over a reverberating, swaying march, burning David Gilmour-esque guitar chords against upper-register piano. Another segue takes them to Help Desk, noir cabaret as Procol Harum might have done it, Bell’s organ and then electric piano holding gentle but firm against the stately punch of the guitars, which finally cut loose in a forest of wild tremolo picking at the end.

Side two begins with a pretty lullaby for solo electric guitar, followed by the towering, 6/8 anthem The Raven. “You won’t have my yellow hair/Lay me down to rest/You left me there,” Bell laments. “I’ll never get you back to the town of West Haven” –  whatever that means. Marshall’s reverb-drenched tremolo guitar climbs with an unleashed fury, and then back down again into Snakes, which with its staggered, tango-ish beat and southwestern gothic ambience reminds of the Walkabouts. The band brings it up, then down again, into the scorching Nektar-style stomp of Altercation, shifting time signatures unexpectedly into a wild, circular organ-and-guitar-fueled jam straight out of Remember the Future, and an unexpectedly funky outro. Catchy and resolutely swaying, Virgil evokes the Grateful Dead, but not so grateful now that they’re in Hades: “Virgil, you’re out of your jurisdiction, now you’re just another man with a gun,” snarls Marshall. The album ends with its most overtly Pink Floyd-influenced number, slide guitar blasting like an August sunset over blacktop. And then it stops cold.

As intense as this album is, Norden Bombsight are even better live. They play Matchless tonight at eleven; watch this space for future shows.

Concert Review: Norden Bombsight at the Delancey, NYC 3/22/10

Two days after declaring Electric Junkyard Gamelan to be the most original band in New York, we have another one for you: Norden Bombsight. Although they draw on plenty of well-known influences, there is no band in town who sound remotely like them. At this week’s Small Beast concert/salon at the Delancey, the five-piece group careened and pounded through a ferocious, frequently haunting 40-minute set that proved impossible to turn away from. They’re something of the missing link between Joy Division and Pink Floyd, like art-rock seen through the prism of punk, or punk rock with a noir, nineteenth century Romantic sensibility. You could call them goth, which would make sense considering how much they like ominous chromatic riffs, but their energy is pure punk – they seem to be dying to live a lot more than living to die.

With the combination of agile drummer Julian Morello (hmm…any relation to Joe?) and hypnotically intense percussionist Derrick Barnicoat (who did double duty quarterbacking their loops and sound effects), they have more stomp and clatter than most bands, which backfired during the first couple of songs as their guitar amps seemed to be misfiring. That actually worked out fine since bassist Jonathan Gundel’s snaky, bluesy lines, part Geezer Butler and part James Brown-era Bootsy, stood out and carried the melody while frontwoman Rachael Bell soared and snarled, clear and menacing above the din, moving between a tiny shortscale electric guitar and piano. The songs shifted shape constantly: early in the set, they launched into a funk groove that took an unexpected detour into a sneaky 5/4 interlude before crescendoing with a bass-driven early Sabbath feel. They were as messy as they were ornate, guitarist David Marshall building to a couple of fret-melting tremolo-picked noiserock solos that Barnicoat sent reeling off into the ozone (they used the same effect on Bell’s vocals in places for an extra eerie touch).

From the piano, Bell delivered a chilling 6/8 dirge strongly evocative of Botanica (whose frontman, Small Beast impresario Paul Wallfisch, had just returned from yet another European tour and was scheduled to play afterward), with a galloping, noisy instrumental break. A creepy Syd Barrett-inflected partita began with yet another catchy Gundel blues bass hook and morphed into a hypnotic, headlong Nektar-style stomp that went on for what seemed like ten minutes. They closed with a stately, elegaic 6/8 anthem which may be the only song ever written to memorialize West Haven, Connecticut (with the limitations of the space, it was hard to hear the vocals when the band cranked it up), complete with nasty white-noise explosion from the guitar, building to an outraged crescendo of voices. Definitely the best rock show we’ve seen this year, sonic issues and all. Norden Bombsight play Matchless in Williamsburg on May 6 at 10ish.