Subtle Lip Can - Subtle Lip Can (2010, Drip Audio)

RIYL = Kingdom Shore, Zs, John Wiese

A goal this year on Forest Gospel is to not worry so much about keeping up with the Joneses. This means that there will be a lot more reviews of albums not released in the present calendar year. That said, Subtle Lip Can’s 2010 self-titled debut is still very new, having been released less than two months ago. And Subtle Lip Can is exactly the reason why I recommend that you, young music fanatic, abandon the rat race for the hippest, newest, most obscurest grail of instant music holiness of 2011. Because it was released in 2010. By a band named Subtle Lip Can. Muscular, taut and hellish, Subtle Lip Can’s debut wraps itself into your subconscious with a contortedly fingered, godly grip, flexes then wrenches. You could call it free jazz or noise or both, but ultimately Subtle Lip Can’s sound can’t be categorized. The album feels mythical and utterly prehistoric, bleak and catatonic, menacingly restrained and methodically supernatural. I could tell you that the trio features Isaiah Ceccarelli on percussion and piano, Bernard Falaise on electric guitar and Josh Zubot on violin, but I could probably just as easily convince you that the album was conceived by a trio of demigods and recorded using a sampling of lacerated tendons, marbled sinews and splintered bones. The band’s invented a tonal vocabulary all its own; a language crimped, parched and folded; a sound that communicates a different kind of communion. Absolutely, most definitely essential listening.

Runst From Thag by Drip Audio