Peter Kolovos - New Bodies

Peter Kolovos
New Bodies
(2009, Thin Wrist)
RIYL = Kevin Drumm, John Wiese, Derek Bailey

Peter Kolovos plays the guitar like John Wiese works a circuit board, his guitar squawking and scribbling out its beautiful spit and grit – its malfunction – all over the place. And New Bodies, New Bodies is the best album I missed last year. How good? Well, I would probably place it somewhere in my top 3 albums of 2009. Possibly number one. Which makes it an obvious mention for one of the best albums of this past decade. I understand that Kolovos’s experimental, hard glitching guitar work, like the spastic blues of Bill Orcutt (probably the other best album I missed from 2009), is a descendent of the all mighty Derek Bailey, but nothing from that man mangles me in quite the same way as New Bodies does. It’s as if, in his improvisations, in these obvious new tones, that Kolovos’s intuition knows perfectly the position and placement of each dotted note, each puncturing slice and every extended wall of garbage laced crunch. The album is, simply, perfect in its deconstruction, its balance, its weight and kill. Do not underestimate this. New Bodies is what a guitar was meant to sound like. It has simply taken all these hundreds of years to perfect it. Mind blowing.

-Thistle