photo courtesy of jimrat
We’ve had an eye on Boston noise rock concern jimrat ever since their peers (and AP faves) in corporeal started resharing the band’s artfully vague and digitally detritous instagram dispathches at the tail end of last year. This light and shadow game the six-piece (to be clear: the question posed by their socials handle whoisjimrat was a daunting task for us until receiving the blood press pic above) plays out in a few different ways. All of their music sits on a bandcamp listed as WHO IS RECORDS, which along with jimrat’s shoegaze-meets-braindance-meets-noise sits a sampling of other artists including a 25 or so minute drone piece attributed simply to ____ with a wall of broken text with jimrat scattered throughout as line notes. Are we to assume these other WHO IS releases are also jimrat efforts hiding in plain sight?
This of course is nothing compared to the band’s official website: a 75% broken Web1.0 type deal hosted on GitHub with several clickable buttons as trap doors that lead into more confusing code language, broken text, and the occsasional Youtube short. All these little games are an enigmatic way of proving jimrat is a project with a keen sense of mystique and an adept knowledge of world building plus an eye for Y2K aesthetics and one hell of an internet connection, but what of the music? Well in short: there are few bands in Boston (at least) moving quite like them. Moving very quickly from the crunchy lo-fi indie rock-isms of their debut self-titled EP from July (of which you will have heard “feel it out” on our radio show), jimrat has yet another two-tracker ready for us today at Allston Pudding. A sort of “sister release” to August’s i hate shoegaze single, neck simialrly pairs a sludge-y guitar stomper with a longer, more cerebral electronica piece.
The title track runs sort of classic indie pop melody through a meat grinder of disortion, room noise, and one big ass crash symbol for a quesy, but exciting three minutes of damaged pop bliss, while the skyward “again” seemlessly threads together a series of mostly rumless synth and guitar sketches to build a kind of ambient epic.
Tap in at the stream below, and here’s what jimrat had to say:
“Neck is a song about longing and loss, complementing the crazed energy of our latest track, I hate shoegaze. Two ideas of the same coin: things can be done right but they end up being done wrong by chance.”
neck is available now on bandcamp as a free download (presumably for a limited time) so go grab it now.