Album Reviews

PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE SOUND
Flashing Open LP
(eclipse)
I think members of Plastic Crimewave have to be the nicest people ever. Steve Krakow, lead huckster, guitarist & much beloved Chicago zinestar of Galactic Zoo Dossier stuffed my hands full of Plastic goods, 7”s, CDs, press releases, what-have-you, at a particular hot show at the Berwick Institute in Boston. This generosity & goodwill was even more of a surprise considering the aggressively freaked-out skronky, acid fuzz-punk they were minstraling just a few hours before. One of the CDs Krakow handed me had an aqua- blue cover, with scrolling, looping psychedelic script on it. Within, it possessed a lifeforce of it’s own volition-a swirling, grating, vampy, trippy rush of noise that has e scratching my head in wonderment. Cheekily self-promoted as “the best psychedelic concept album in 25 years,” Flashing Open is like a freight train sized hurdy-gurdy programmed to crank out the stuff of Syd Barrett’s own nightmares. The record starts off harmlessly enough with “No Vision”, a lazy, druggy drone of far-away vocals, scraped guitar strings, cymbal ticking, and plectrum-stressed string instruments. Almost as soon as this tune recedes into gentle, backward-masked guitar, it launches into “Caged Fire theme”, an impossibly noisy scrabble of furious , acidic fuzz guitar & snarling, almost black-metal infused vocals. This song is a seven-minute tornado. But it’s not all psychedelia & noise, songs like “Go Away” sound almost gothy, while “Perfect Glass Orchards” feel like old Pylon – it has that angular, sparse Athens, GA 1983 sound. “Giant’s Eyes” has an anthemic, doom-y feel that launches off into the stratosphere of absolute noise, with Krakow'’ thin vocals buried beneath it all. This is not to say that Plastic Crimewave isn’t capable of anything but chaos: the record finishes off nicely with a murky indiefied folk ballad, which provides a nice rest after the storm.

-Amanda Bristow (Indie Pop #7)