Albums of the Year # 14 Warehouse

From a couple of months ago on here. Warehouse and Hoops have being playing dates together recently which must have made for pretty interesting shows.

Warehouse, from Atlanta, Georgia, released their second album, super low, last Friday. It's a tremendous record in many ways. It feeds on the energy of the Athens, Georgia, college music scene of the late seventies and early eighties. The alternatively angular and fluid guitars of Alex Bailey and Ben Jackson and the rhythm section of Josh Hughes and Doug Bleichner create a bedrock for Elaine Edenfield's extraordinary vocals which are a raspy, fluttering,  throaty howl. It's arty in the extreme and incredibly diverting in every respect.

It's reminiscent to me of R.E.M's Murmur, an album that meant an enormous amount to me personally in the early eighties. The first record that I really made my own. Also the first album I wrote about on here. I must have listened to it in my room at the top of our family house in Teddington hundreds of times, hearing different things in the mix every time so nuanced and thoughtfully was it put together.

super low promises comparable long term rewards on the basis of having listened to it over the last couple of days. It's similarly textured and ambitious, offering reminders both of early R.E.M and more so their college compadres Pylon. It's wonderful to hear these bands' spirit built on and echoed, but not slavishly imitated, Warehouse have a scope and ambition all of their own. 

With song titles like Arbitrarium V, Modifier Analog, Simultaneous Contrasts and Audrey Horne, if anything their intent is more obscure and enigmatic even than these two bands. Reservoir, (posted here), is super low's, Radio Free Europe, the nearest they come to a bold anthemic statement. Edenfield's voice is sure not to be to everyone's taste, but I love its swooping, questing qualities, (it took me a day to work out her gender), just as I love the melodic, punky, adventuring of the musicianship. Their aren't enough bands that attempt to dig this deep. Warehouse, ones to watch!