Lambsbread - Shitgayz (Maim & Disfigure CD-R)

The great Zac Davis stopped through Bard this past Tuesday with drummer Ryan Jewell for a killer duet set. Started off nice and scrappy for the first cut, then ended up as a sludgey riff heavy stop-start thing, real weird and great. Jewell's drum kit got some beautiful sounds as bowls were bowed and forks were clattered. Anyway, I managed to score some Maim & Disfigure items, and figured I'd start with this one by Zac's most oft-associated group, Lambsbread.

Actually, it was originally Lambsbread that was going to play at Bard but I guess drummer Shane Mackenzie scored a sweet deal with some new job, so Zac went out with Ryan instead, which was great but whole different vibe than this disc for sure. Made up only of Zac, Shane and bassist kathy O'Dell, Lambsbread represent Zac at his loudest and sloppiest, just one big full throttle rock stew made to order.

Shitgayz is one of their newer efforts and it's grimey as hell, just careening around from heavy riffage into slow stoned megariffs. Consisting only of two tracks for a total of about twenty-two minutes, the whole thing actually needs no more to ground you. O'Dell's bass rips around in weird circuitous rounds of nowhereness while Zac goes from full blown strummed out death cries into less gigantic realms of weird fuckery, diddling around before getting all Derek Bailey on the strings.

The second track, the longer of the two at about thirteen minutes, starts off right where the first leaves off. This is full blown grind mode, all a squeezing of these distorted crunching sounds from all three corners of the table. When Shane's drums come in with a steady beat, it only lasts about ten seconds before he too starts to let loose. Zac's guitar really wails on this one; it's heavy stuff indeed, alive and, of course, stoned as shit. Like a stripped down Burnt Hills with less of the psych and more of the dirt.

have to make mention too of the killer packaging on this one. From the play on the "shitgaze" genre name to the theft of the Spin article art text it all works here. Hell even the fucking swastikas work. Check this out, a paste on on the back direct from Spin: "Everything these bands record is spiked in the red and cloaked in caustic fuzz. Vocals are intelligible every so often, and snare hits resemble chopsticks on tinfoil." Sans vocals that sounds a hell of a lot like Lambsbread to me. If only Spin could be clued in as to what they're really writing about... killer disc.