[rating=4.50]
.jpg)
So Many Dynamos prove on their third release that you don’t have to play three chords and two melodies to smash guitars anymore. On The Loud Wars, the St. Louis four-piece cuts and pastes warp speed beats and thrash-happy hooks over punk’s spit, piss and blood and ends up with a chaos-soaked pile of snarled lips, gashed thumbs and ringing ears that just might be one of the year’s best records.
On “It’s Gonna Rain,” Aaron Stovall’s emo headbanger voice screams the album’s de facto mantra, “I don’t wanna make amends, I just wanna make a mess!” but rarely is such a mess so calculated: a lyric from one song reappears in another, the beat from one is sped up and inserted into the next, and there are footnotes to explain it all, along with cryptic, post-modern lyrics that reveal a hipster disgust with humanity and a cynical determination to milk it dry. “Glaciers” accepts the world’s catastrophic end but declares “we’ll go on living like we always do.” Whether it’s an apathetic shrug or a reluctant resolve to eat, drink and be merry, the ship is going down, and none of us has the power to stop it.
“New Bones” hears Handsome Furs along the distance between us and looks around only to see the self-protective contempt we wear like armor, and “If You Didn’t Want to Know” soundtracks The Dismemberment Plan over the inevitably frustrated sighs and rolling eyes that greet us when we finally bridge the gap. This is math rock for post-punks: burning with the same fire, but reluctant to share it outside the band’s machine-gun drumming and angular riffs. Whether The Loud Wars is asking or answering, So Many Dynamos knows the question: What does it say about us when we find humor in tragedy? Are we just coping, or are we actively seeking a cool that only begets cruel? Whatever. The ship may be sinking, but they’re going to keep playing till they’re eyeball deep in ice-cold, bloody water.
