Thursday, August 30, 2007

Hot Shruti


I tend to think that more bands should sound like the Raincoats, the Slits, early Velvet Underground, the Silver Apples, the United States of America, and Stereolab, so I was happy to hear the steady throb of Numbers. Their new record, Now You Are This, just came out on Kill Rock Stars. What makes the music sort of take physical shape as you listen is that the vocal harmonies seem to exist as if piped in from some other realm, a Platonic ideal of how sound actually is shape. Also, any band that rocks the shruti box - the contraption that Indian musicians use to simulate the swarming drones of the tambura or the harmonium to establish the subsuming reference pitch of a raga – is all right by me. And they also enter the pantheon of band names that are unsearchable by Google.




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