Monday 18 February 2013

Crow verses Crow / Yeah I Know It Sucks

Online radio show Crow verses Crow have featured one of Umez's tracks from their Liminal Noise  cassette along with a whole host of other awesome musics.

Listen here: Crow Verses Crow

Also:

Blog 'Yeah I Know It Sucks' posted this complimentary review of the Umez cassette:

"London must be a merrier place with UMEZ in it… the fog is lifting, the tea is boiling over into the streets. Love & Anarchy in the UK! You can blame it on UMEZ, an experimentally awesome Japanese noisepop group. We had this short album that is also available on tape sent to us for review recently, and I have to say… I’m in love with it! I listened to the first track probably two or three times. Speaking of…

… ‘Good Bye My Friend’ begins with some fuzzy guitar, some acoustic guitar and what sounds like it could be a simple 606 rhythm track. The guitars filter out and then back in, and the music starts picking up, sounding like a beautiful day, a day of wild energy spent on recreation. We hear some kind of crazy guitar solo stuff that begins with what might have been a scream-ish sort of thing. The vocals are all very pretty and dreamy, adding a feel that is almost like shoegaze, subdued and introspective, and it works very well with the more uptempo style of the music. Toward the end the drums start getting more intense, like someone is just slamming down on some toms.

‘Hello Pt1′ surprises the ears with blasts of sonic noise! Weird electro sounds are bonking around amidst the chaos. Then there’s a repeating low bass hit, followed by more audio harshness. This is really great! Screams are happening here. It’s like a soup of frequencies, most of them in the highs and mids. Very effective use of filtering and effects, panning especially in one section. I think a flock of menacing pigeons are attacking my head, and for some reason I’m enjoying myself.

The next track, ‘Z Fighters 2 With C6.1′, kicks off with a low synth sequence with amp distortion… some white-noise static modulation… the vocals seem to have a slight touch of tremolo and are really nice! It’s like listening to a lullaby run through a distortion pedal. The synth/violin lead is really cool, it sounds as if the key it’s in is meant to disorient the senses. This track has an uptempo throb to it that I find hypnotic as well. Suddenly, bell tones shriek their way into the mix, disrupting everything else, and then when the track gets back to where it was there’s a really beautiful arpeggiated synth that’s been added. The vocals shift for a bit, sounding like they’re coming from another place in space and with more reverb.

Then there’s a bouncing ball thing happening that gives way to screaming noise on ‘Hello pt2′. Laser resonance, harsh signal tones everywhere. A voice pans back and forth for a time, yelling in each of our ears. Several contraptions seem to be malfunctioning at once, throttling, exploding. The vocals emulate this… screaming and harsh.

Then, unfortunately, it ends… but it was a lot of fun to listen to."

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