Born under a heavy star, Bird Names has obliged the psychic charter of avant pop since the early-mid 2000s. Lurking hard in the shadows of American underground music, they paint masques to their faces, and pantomime phantasms of the soul they have known, elaborating a blissful, acid-fried vision of Culture Death, mirroring the happy grotesques of our world. They value the truth in simplicity and the truth in ambiguity. The group's inaugural release, 2005's "Fantic Yard," splayed the nuggets from the group's sprawling output to that date, cataloging vast plateaus of pop experimentation caught on a variety of formats across months of mindsets and recording environments. The Chicago Reader called it "one of the brightest products of Chicago's art damage scene in some time," and also that it may have been recorded "in a men's stall at the United Center." Bird Names bowed before their psychic charter through '05 and '06, touring, honing, and recording scads of music for a series of barely-released albums. 2006's "On Opaque Things" (Pecan Crazy), breaking out of this mold, works as a photograph, binding the successful experiments of three weeks in May spent writing and recording two songs a day. Touched by a sense of soulful lightness, of the vitality in creation, the album was lauded where it was noticed as "childlike and terrifying . . . pop experiments [that] gleefully break paradigms and create pleasure," "incredibly great" (PopSheep.com), the 2nd best album of 2006 (Jackin' Pop Critics Poll). This substantial musical output comes to a hilt, and continues evolving, with Bird Names' collaborations on Unsound Records, "Wooden Lake / Sexual Diner" ('07) and "Open Relationship" ('08). "Wooden Lake / Sexual Diner" ('07) sustains the group's masterful dispatching of cassette four-track recording, bringing a density of orchestration, of sonic wilderness that sprawls off the tape. Darker in tone than past efforts, the record projects a swallowing, confusing atmosphere that nips at the ear, and stirs the imagination to strange effect. By concise popcraft, surf guitar, and groves of keyboards, the considered document casts a mood "strewn through unyielding carnival rides, doused in moonshine and baked through and through . . . confusingly endearing" (audiversity.com) and "undomesticated, raucous, urgent, and alien like the 20s and 30s stuff on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music." (Chicago Reader) "Open Relationship," just released here on Unsound, is the purest actualization yet of the Bird Names' sonic ideal. Collaborating with Griffin Rodriguez (Beirut, Akron /Family, Icy Demons, Man Man) on quarter-inch reel-to-reel, Bird Names produced a modern pop gem that glistens with creativity, songcraft, soul, and sound. The Chicago Reader says "No big surprise, but the new Bird Names record, Open Relationship, is a piece of weirdo pop brilliance that sounds pretty much unlike anything else happening right now, unless there's such a thing as a Chinese Os Mutantes." Check it out. |
