Whoops, had this written and everything yesterday, but looks like I saved it instead of posting… This week features one of my favorite albums from 2007, Myth Takes by !!! (pronounced Chk Chk Chk).
Rating: 8.0
Any tentative or half-baked delivery is all but absent from Myth Takes, which rampages through the annals of kinetic music without letting genre tropes override or diffuse the songs’ impact. The cerebral always takes a backseat to the visceral, and the album, while varied, is united by relentless propulsion. The title track’s elastic bass and spaghetti-western guitar licks are a tense backdrop for Offer’s smarmy scatting– not to mention an effective foil to the ominous funk-laden following track, “All My Heroes Are Weirdoes”. Mobile bass and telegraphic synths dominate the sex-jam “Must Be the Moon”, a sort of pimp-strutting nursery rhyme for the 21+ set (“One drink, two drinks, three drinks, four!”). “A New Name” holds two contrasting modes in balance: earthy funk verses and a spacey soul-noir chorus that sloughs off tiny ice-chip tones, testifying to the importance of bassist and sound engineer Justin Vandervolgen’s subtle tweaks. No longer experimenting for experimentation’s sake, every beat-breaking decision on Myth Takes serves to reinforce the monumental rhythms.
Quoted from Pitchfork