We first wrote about Grooms back in 2013, a short post to see in the single ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, but never had a chance to write about their subsequent album Infinity Caller.
Since then, the band, led by Texan native Travis Johnson, have been through a bit of an uprooting. Brooklyn indie venue Death By Audio was forced to move late last year in murky circumstances. The place served as Grooms’ practice space for the last seven years and housed Johnson’s pedal company, as well as being home for bassist Jay Heiselmann. I’m not in a position to pass judgement on the whole affair, but lets just say that the whole thing has to do with Vice media and their new offices. Of course, Vice is edgy and cool and “Brooklyn” enough to make all this acceptable, right? Right?
Regardless of the actions of a certain metastatic corporation slash ever-expanding nebula of immersive investigative journalism, Grooms have a made new album. Comb the Feelings Through Your Hair sees the band undergo a stylistic transformation, pushing Johnson’s guitar to the back row to make room for electronics that sit somewhere between ambient and psychedelic. Opener ‘Bed Version’ encapsulates this, the drumming supported by a variety of weird and dream-like sounds. The title track is equally eerie, an indie rock song as heard through an apathetic stoner filter (think Johnny Foreigner slowed down and on some form of
psilocybin). Other standouts include ‘Doctor M’, a Sonic-Youth inspired track that morphs into an ethereal instrumental, and the spacey closer ‘Later a Dream’, which turns the mind-bending up to 11 with layers of samples and electronics and speed changes.
The result is an album that straddles the accessibility and catchiness of pop and the challenging interest of experimentalism, offering the listener a familiar thread and then dragging her through a strange and ominous maze where violence seems to lurk just out of sight.
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The violence comes to fruition on ‘Something Wild’, a song about wrecking the waterfront condos that are driving up the cost of living in Brooklyn neighbourhoods such as Williamsburg and Greenpoint. The track seems doubly pertinent after Death By Audio’s experience of the gentrification of ‘arty’ areas. Not only are big companies (Vice) pushing local businesses out of their buildings, but other big companies (condo guys) have driven up the New York real estate market to the point where the good guys have nowhere to go. That said, the violence still seems subdued, a muted, showy kind of thing akin to scratching the boss’s car after a bad day in work. It’s a rebellious act by someone who knows they are an all-too-squishable bug in comparison to the organisation they are taking on.
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Unsettling and twitchy and weird, Comb the Feelings Through Your Hair plays like what the Big Corporations hope is a cadaveric spasm but is in fact the pissed-off undead writhing of a locale that will not be silenced no matter how many multi-storey office blocks and fuck-off neon signs are built on top of it. Grooms have made a record that is chock full of anxiety and insecurity but also a strange confidence. In this way it is a modern record, a slow realisation that feeling nervous or sad or scared does not mean you are weak or wrong but rather comes part of the deal when you of fight for what you believe to be right.