TxN

When I first discovered Ectoplasm Girls in 2009, I knew that this would be something to keep my eye on. All the boxes were checked: noisy, weird, experimental, yet with a touch of catchiness as well. Not that it's pop by anyone's standard; you won't be singing along to this stuff in the shower, unless you're me or possibly next to me and trying to follow along while slowly edging out of the shower door. I'm maintaining eye contact with you the whole time you're backing up too, it's really aggressive and sexual. Don't use my towel.

TxN is the debut LP from this Swedish sister duo, collecting material from their 2008 cassette release as well as their newer sounds. Since many of the tracks consist of abstract beats and detuned instruments underneath plaintive, submerged vocals, it's hard to tell old from new, but that's okay because it's all pretty damn good. Equal parts playful and sinister, Tanya and Nadine Byrne deconstruct a piano on 'Before It Gets Too Late To Begin', which sounds nothing so much as a warped tape recording of a child's talent show. Glitch mobs the mood on 'I Is the Heart', 8-bit crunches and a drunken wave pattern pulse out tension into the blood before releasing into 'It's True'. The quasi-industrial beat teases at danceability, but is skewed and layered beneath noise to keep the mind (and feet) off-balance.

'Sexodrome' was the first track I heard back in 2009, and it remains a favorite. An echoing shriek is punctuated with metallic clangs, a violent sexual summoning of dead machinery and dying cities. 'If Your Mother Asks' is another favorite, again skirting close to a dance beat without ever being danceable (unless you're up for a mutant rave) and machine-gun beats. 'You Be Me' and 'Momma Put Me In A Pie' are claustrophobic, sweeping the mind into a room of massive machines that chug and churn. In fact, if you were to encapsulate an entire industrial wasteland, smoke and stink and endless iron beasts that endlessly grind, encapsulate this into a single black room and then fill this room with the drowned ghosts of a hundred exotic birds, then you would have both a strange analogy and a run-on sentence. Plus it comes with a poster!