kevincrouse.net

Over the past two years, Fire Talk Records has become a trusted go-to source for finding great new artists. They’ve curated a tight roster of acts who fall across a wide spectrum of post-punkish indie style rock. Rack em’ up: Deeper, Cola, Dehd, Mamalarky, and Bnny to name a few – but it’s been Wombo, a power trio out of Kentucky, that has most captured my imagination over the past year. While they have two albums prior that are wide sprawling in ideas and performance, it’s on last year’s excellent “Keesh Mountain” EP where they leaned into a decidedly more angular and Dada approach. Their new album Fairy Rust builds on top of that in layers, pushing further on their ability to veer from math rock to pop hooks and finds them hitting a solid stride in carving out a sound all of their own. It’s a clean sparse production that puts their tight instrumental interplay front and center, with bassist/singer Sydney Chadwick’s detached and eerie voice tying the time-signature shifting skronk together in ways that belie the cacophony often going on underneath.