Aluminum – Fully Beat (2024)

Review: On their debut album Fully Beat, San Francisco’s Aluminum responds to the pressure of modern life from a place of sonic nostalgia that is neither jaded nor pastiche. The influences of bands like Bowery Electric, Happy Mondays, The Breeders, and My Bloody Valentine are prominent but never to the point where it feels like the project is purely a palimpsest of what has preceded it. Aluminum assert themselves as proficient hitmakers immediately on album opener “Smile,” which features dynamic propulsion provided by whipping guitar tremolo and a snare-bright beat. On lead single “Behind my Mouth,” Ryann Gonsalves’s bratty utterances of “huh” offer a fun layer of percussion that sits well amid the big beat shuffle provided by drummer Chris Natividad. The band continues using the soothing power of nostalgia to highlight the harsh absurdity of trying to carry ourselves with vulnerability when the systems we have built demand efficiency. Moments of soft strangeness like the track, “Birds Flew Here,” revel in an ability to unnerve that sits in thrilling contrast to the band’s talent for concocting moments of anthemic pop such as “Always Here, Never There.” The ideas developed on Fully Beat are solid, the delivery slick. A track like “HaHa” has a laissez-faire attitude in the face of impending, inevitable anxiety right before the frantic, rollicking ‘Pulp’ begins. That tracks so different in energy can sit next to each other without either feeling decontextualized— slow, contemplative moments surrounded by waves of shoegazey guitar, buoyant trip-hop shuffles, and hypnotic synths— is a testament to Aluminum’s tight sound and cohesive vision; their knowledge of tradition does not hinder their willingness to experiment. Instead, on Fully Beat, tradition and experimentation mutually impact each other to inform a more dynamic experience of the now. — bandcamp

Track List: 01 Smile 02 Always Here, Never There 03 Behind My Mouth 04 HaHa 05 Pulp 06 Beat 07 Everything 08 Call An Angel 09 Birds Flew Here 10 Upside Down

Media Report: Genre: dream-pop, indie-rock Origin: San Francisco, California, USA
Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)

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