Vinyl LP
A current crop of guitar bands are engaged in an arms race towards twitchier twitchiness and nervier nerviness. Ever-drier. Ever-crisper. The tireless pursuit of the wonky sublime. This has been escalating for a few years now, but Dutch quartet Geo throw down a decisive marker with their debut album, Out Of Body.
On album opener “Sunglasses” there’s a lyric that hints at the construction of these songs, like a rough blueprint. Frontman Jorne Visser snarls, “the music sounds weird, the rhythm sounds fine.” Gijs Deddens’s drums form loping, tight grooves while guitars, bass, and keyboards strike out on their own, free to break rhythmic and melodic conventions. The guitar solo on “So Many Ways” is everything a guitar solo should be: short and sharp; a screech of dentistry-rattling noise, an almost comic counter to the traditional eyes-closed, look-at-me posturing. Likewise on “Caught A Cricket,” where keyboard player Ype Zijlstra seems to just hit random notes. And why not?
The liner notes describe Out Of Body—rather wonderfully—as an “absurdist Punch and Judy show,” a description that encapsulates the album’s slightly pugilistic approach. A guitar might discharge one of those rickety chromatic riffs then a crappy synth may retort before a staccato bass note interrupts. Visser is the confrontational narrator, a sardonic, Mark E Smith-esque narrator that speaks in gnomic terms about “building the invisible house, high, high, high” and how “feelings are fictive.” It’s all dissonance and friction, all knobbly musical ideas that are just about contained by Deddens’s infectious drum patterns, the stage on which the other members do battle.
Out Of Body isn’t improvisation, though. It’s not pure spontaneity. These songs are constructed and shaped for impact, from the first deadened cowbell to the last dissonant guitar interval. In the end, Out Of Body represents a quantum leap in the angularity arms race, and it sounds weird, yes, but oh so fine.
