b r a n d o n

Four years after their debut, Zs returns with the full-length Arms. In between these two studio albums, we've had our appetities whetted by a series of EPs (Karate Bump, Magnet and Four Systems) and a firecracker of a live album (Buck). Maybe it's not surprising that it's taken them so long to churn out album #2. After all, these guys think a lot about their music, and they want you to as well. Keyboardist, guitarist and composer Charlie Looker says this about the opener, "B Is For Burning," in a must-read article at Paper Thin Walls: It's this long, non-repeating melody with a drone underneath. But both parts get hocketed a lot—passed around—so it sounds like it's constantly shifting. It's a trick Sam [Hillmer, saxophonist] and I got from being into early music. They also do it a lot in African mbira [thumb piano] music. The melody, though, isn't random—it's what me and Sam call "a continuum of similitudes." We took it from a Foucault essay on Renaissance art. God, you're probably just gonna throw me the fuck outta here. This quote is illustrative not only of the band's ethos but also of their sound. A lot of Zs' compositions seem to have these pseudo-melodies that are either passed between instruments or played in unison, sometimes at breakneck speed, sometimes in mind-bendingly shifting tempos and odd time signatures. There are definite shades of King Crimson circa Discipline, only way uglier and more dissonant and often with more dynamic, unpredictable rhythms. Most of the pieces on Arms feature this kind of thing, and it's taken to an extreme on the centerpiece of the album, the 11-minute "I Can't Concentrate." This amusingly titled composition consists of six minutes of the entire band playing unison lines with impressive tightness, before breaking down into an extremely repetitive section that, just before it drives you to pull your hair out and scream, explodes into a brutal squealing saxophone apocalypse that's downright exhilirating (and the closest thing to a solo you'll ever hear from these guys). The end. Pretty much every piece on this album is notable, but the one that obviously stands out (aside from "I Can't Concentrate") is "Nobody Wants to Be Had," which was previewed on the Buck live album. This song features vocals, sung in unison by Looker and guitarist Ben Greenberg, with a constantly changing rhythmic pulse. This version benefits from being recorded in a studio; it's tighter and sounds better than the live take, and the result is breathtaking. It also might be one of the very few songs I've heard where the music actually gets more complicated in the vocal sections — the instrumental parts actually contain one of the more catchy, straightforward riffs on the entire album, but those vocal lines are fiendish. The closing two tracks on Arms show that Zs can do the quiet thing just as well as they can do fast and frenzied. "Except When You Don't Because Sometimes You Won't" is trancelike in its repetition, and "Z Is For Zone" is a perfect comedown of a closer, sort of Zs doing their particular version of ambient music. All things considered, Arms is perhaps the strongest effort yet from one of the most interesting avant-rock groups to hit the scene since, well, ever. review by Brandon Wu — 11-27-07 —