Excerpt – “Let us be clear about this: Plastic Explosives is one of the finest recent records we’ve found, from any act, local or otherwise. (It) is beautiful, plain and simple, and a treat to listen to passively. It keeps gently reminding you, though, just how subtly rich its songs are, how much it has to offer. It’s a masterpiece, tucked away in and revealing the crowded streets and quiet record stores of the District.”
Excerpt – “They’re taking Brill Building songs and writing them in invisible ink, turning jazz standards into Twilight Zone episodes, turning folk songs into clouds of fog.”
Excerpt – “You’re forced to occupy their barren pop architecture…. You don’t understand it, but, though you might not admit it, you do hope it will understand you. Or at least not destroy you…. You feel like there’s a real live pop song in there somewhere, but it seems that most of the essential moments have been recorded over with silence or incidental noise. There’s obviously still a skeleton to hang a song on, but you start to wonder whether you’re the one who was supposed to bring it…. These songs are for real, but they’re not about disappointment, or complacency, or shame, or attention, or glee. They’re about themselves. Without ironic distance, such oblique experiments can seem exhausting. But only on the giving end: it takes a humble and prolific writer, some cunning musicians, a very patient engineer, and an overarching commitment to self-censorship to pull an album like this off.”
Excerpt – “The Caribbean. Shadowy quintet (perhaps trio?) draped in velvet enigma. Or maybe justc on a light-beer budget, faceless contributors scattered hither and yon, submitting stealthy sonic fragments via telephone transmissions and paper-airplane parachute drops. Descended from primo D.C. agitpop, old-school division. Certainly of the Dischord tribe (see: the flip attitude of the Make-Up or Jawbox’s raw edge). But also Eggs. And Tsunami. The coy pop-culture savvy of Unrest (witness witty wordplay on “Annunciator Zone”: “All those great Chicago bands like King Crimson and Kraftwerk or that one that sounds like Tortoise”). Third albums. The landscape littered with the bleached skeletons of Zen Arcade and Zenyatta Mondatta. Third. Or even III. But this—History’s First Know-It-All—is knowing. Cynical, yet naively hopeful. Apropos of crushed feelings. Household appliances. Class of ‘83, UCLA. All lovingly rendered in illegible, handwritten scribble-scrawl and plunked down erect beside sounds both found (celery crunching) and created (piano backdrops, drum stutters, nylon-stringed guitar webs). Glorious eclecticism or hipster fence-straddling? More the former than latter. Purposefully arcane and brainy-sounding hangtags: “Fresh Out Of Travel Agent School.” “It’s Unlikely To Settle The Difference.” (Todd Rundgren fans, in this day and age? Why not?) The verdict: difficult but rewarding, albeit in that William Carlos Williams kind of way. So much depends upon/A third longplayer/Glazed with dour postures/Beside the white women.”
