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LP
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SED 060LP
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"Ten years, five records, and The Weird Weeds remain a band without a country. With songs too lopsided and winding to rock and tunes too overt for stuffier experimentalists, they happily occupy a territory all their own -- strange and singular, but not devoid of a knotty interior logic. After a career built on left turns, the band takes its boldest self-departure to date; appropriately, their first self-titled record feels the most alien and most self-assured. What once splintered now sprawls and pithiness blossoms into widescreen vision. The elements of the band's previous incarnations -- Aaron Russell's spiraling guitar arcs, Nick Hennies' nuanced drumming, Sandy Ewen's guitar squeaks and scrapes -- are now underpinned by a new rhythmic intensity, a loping, sun-beaten motorik replacing the skewed pop of previous releases. Across nine untitled instrumental tracks, songs freeze in loops that unwind under their own weight or gather into busy, flickering swarms. From the Alvin Lucier shimmer of the opening track to the stunning dovetailed rhythmic cells of the album's centerpiece to the twilight keening of its elegant coda, The Weird Weeds is an object lesson in purposeful repetition: songs expand into exploded diagrams that reveal new sonic and emotional contours with the slightest change in perspective."
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