Musical instability in rock music is not appreciated by all, but if you caught that bug – say – from Syd Barret’s solo records, or from The Pixies (like we did) it’s then very very hard not to embrace it. In their bizarre and (in most cases) gently noisy new album "Breaking Mirrors," Brooklyn duo/quartet Blanche Blanche Blanche cultivates music instability – together with a few other sonic ideas, like a certain angularity that has nothing to do with squares and rectangles, but rather with weirdly shaped polygons. The songs in "Breaking Mirrors" are actually very poppy, they feature simple melodies and structures, but (like all our favorite records) they sound nothing like pop. Sarah Smith’s dead pan vocals and ambivalent lirycs double the feeling of estrangedness, and numb alienation created by arrangements that sound like geometry lessons disturbed by radio interferences. Somewhat reminiscent of Suicide and early Wire, but playing their electric instruments with an even more mechanical approach through bit crunching effects and fidelity disintegrating devices, Blanche Blanche Blanche pull off an imaginative hybrid of lo-fi, math rock, goth, noise rock and industrial, that shies away from all current trends, and sounds as fresh and challenging as it sounds, well… depressing. Which is something that’s actually making us quite happy right now!
