Yume Bitsu - s/t
(Ba Da Bing!)
This album has been in my cd player nearly every day since I got it.
Yume Bitsu are from Washington state, their brand new album will be coming out
on K records later this year, and their drummer plays guitar and sings
in the band Wolf Colonel, who also have a few releases on K.
Though these are all good reasons to think that Yume Bitsu are a pop
band à la the Crabs or Tiger Trap, they aren't even close. Of the
Northwest bands, they share much more with Jessamine or Magnog than
anything on K.
Yume Bitsu are a 4 piece who use guitars, bass, keyboards, and drums to
create poppy drone rock. They mix easily discernable pop melodies (made more
obvious by prominent vocals) with droney atmosphere. Occasionally (and
when I say occasionally, I mean a lot of the time), they go pretty far
into spacey jams in between the "catchy" parts, which is great since
that is where they hit their peaks. For the most part, the keyboard,
bass, and drums hold the steady drone below while one guitar meanders
around, moving from playing a constant part along with the bass to droning
out. The other guitar spends most of it's time building and building, moving
further and further into space. The overall result is a very dense
atmosphere carried by a song that goes from laid back to intense
throughout.
The album opens with "Team Yume," an instrumental that sets the mood for
the album as a slow building, textured exploration of drone rock. An
already very atmospheric "Surface I" is given an atmospheric remix by
their keyboard player and titled as "Surface II." Many times while
listening to the remix, I have been reminded of Randall Niemann's Füxa
side project, Unexplained Transmissions. Between "Surface I" and
"Surface II" is "Truth," which breaks up the ambience with some more
defined structure and nice singing. The last track, "The Frigid, Frigid
Body of Dr. TJ Eckleberg " is 18:29 long. Despite how good they are,
I don't often feel the desire to sit through songs this long.
However, I've never have felt the urge to skip through this one. Even
though the shortest song on this album is just under 8 minutes, Yume
Bitsu songs just don't seem long. As a whole, the album flows
perfectly, supplying sparse atmospheres or driving rock smothered with
delayed guitar and all points in between.
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