Eyes – Night Eyes (Seed)

Iowa-based electronic / alt-pop / No Wave four-piece Eyes have already developed a reputation for impressive live shows, having provided tour support over the last couple of years to the likes of Health and Dan Deacon. This debut album from Eyes ‘Night Eyes’ arrives in the wake of over 30 different home-recorded lo-fi projects from the band, and sees the quartet fashioning a curiously accessible fusion of experimental art rock, punk-funk grooves, raucous vocals and electro elements that at times calls to mind everything from The Rapture to Animal Collective. If the opening ‘Stonehenge – Intro’ suggests a difficult listen ahead with its chaotic collage of distorted vocals, clattering rhythms and disorienting layers of samples, ‘There You Go’ offers up a far easier listen, with the collision of dry electro kickdrums and swirling free-jazz horns beneath frontman William Harris’ wide-eyed vocals particularly calling to mind the aforementioned Animal Collective’s ‘Summertime Clothes.’ By comparison, the tense jerky jazz-rock grooves and nervous white funk vocals that inhabit ‘Silver Plateau’ suggest perhaps a closer kinship to !!! or Rapture frontman Luke Jenner’s anxious yelp, a stylistic trajectory that’s maintained by the swirling mutant Stax / Motown grooves of ‘Clown Lady’ and ‘Catch A Charge’s acceleration into streamlined, Chicago house-fuelled punk-funk. While there’s certainly more than a fair quotient of dancefloor-friendly material on offer here however, there’s still plenty of crazed art-noise here to startle the unwary – see the downright tweaked-out slow jazz-rock reworking of James Stewart’s ‘Worry Boy’ and ‘Mister Ssippi’s eccentric banjo and tambourine hoedown. Yes, it’s suitably bizarre stuff, but nothing that’ll freak out those weaned on the similarly dance-flirtatious likes of Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance…with the CD pressing limited to just 500 copies, you’ll want to move fast though.