by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Nashville's Spodee Boy aka Connor Cummins, embraces being weird. The band's press release calls Cummins both the cities' "greatest cartoon weirdo" and "premier freak" before you've even read as far as the text's body. The one man band's ramshackle lo-fi punk draws heavily from the Devo gene pool, but Spodee Boy has devolved a bit further from the tree, back to a primal state where structure, intent, and any resemblance of clarity are foreign ideas. This is the filth, the underbelly, the audible insanity where rudimentary blown-out chaos reigns supreme, captured at it's rawest on a 4-track Tascam. It's a mess of freaked out post-punk for all those with fried minds.
Opening with the perfect introductory skit, Spodee asks "hey baby, are you coming to the show tonight?" to a quick response of "I don't know Spodee, you're kinda weird and your band sucks," and its all cacophonous from there "forward." The walls of Cummins' art-punk gradually crumbles on Red State, in all seven minutes of lo-fi filth, opening at it's most infectious ("Red State") and spiraling way out beyond the void by the time of the eponymous track. The band tear through post-punk grooves ("Sweatin'") and blistering noise ("II"), combining a deranged sense of humor with elastic rhythms that seemingly collapse without notice into a harsh lo-fi abyss. "#1 Hit," the EP's centerpiece is a demented shred fest, a song that takes unintelligible grunts, howls, and warped shrieks and pairs them with a thick groove and an insistently loose guitar solo, sprawling out and annihilating all its in path. It's destructive and ugly, and full of Spodee Boy's feral wisdom and utter lack of grace.
Spodee Boy's Red State is out July 7th via Drop Medium Recording Technologies.