by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
The difference between a good band and a great band is a great drummer. Sometimes (many times) that great drummer is also an all around gifted musician… it just comes with the territory. Max Goldstein, best known as the drummer for Tundrastomper and Fred Cracklin is indeed a great drummer and an all around gifted musician. Maxshh is his solo project, one where anything goes and seemingly everything works. Since his debut (a gorgeous full length split in 2018 with Lrrr) and last year’s essential Half A Loaf album, the project has been pushing the envelope of avant-garde pop, mutant post-hardcore, and math rock. With his latest album, Feedback & PB, due out January 29th via Sad Cactus, Maxshh has thoroughly blown “the envelope” to bits and the freaky results are utterly compelling.
Recorded sporadically over the span of five years, it’s a colossal reflection of Goldstein’s many impulses, with each idea fully explored and given space to evolve. This is a fantastically weird album and it wears that experimental quality with a cohesive grace. It’s not strange for the sake of being strange, Maxshh’s latest is still built on songs (damn fine songs), but the tendency to push those songs further into the abyss of no-wave, manipulated noise, and the progressive beyond is ever apparent. Which is all to say that Feedback & PB is a wild ride, but one that’s been constructed as such from the classical folk swoon of “Song for F” to the impenetrable atonal finale of “Alignment,” and all the cacophony that comes between. There’s no one song that captures this album, it’s a living, breathing statement of shifting ideas, which really needs to be heard in full.
There are songs that revolve around tangled post-hardcore (“Tweener”) and songs that revolve around disorienting dream pop (“Cuddlesong”). There are those that throw the formula out the window and sound like warped trip-hop k-holes (“Speeddial”), those that have the effect of layered and combustible power-pop (“Hungry Hungry Hypocrite”), and fuzzy barn burners (“Breakfast of Chimps”), but there’s little that can prepare any listener for the way everything is strung together and how the fractured pieces fall into place. Maxshh has given a gift to the sonically adventurous with Feedback & PB, a record both brilliant and delightfully challenging.