Most artists who call themselves sound designers – those solitary musicians seeking to place aural oddities from their surrounding environments into their music – usually go about it in the most serious ways imaginable (think Eno or Peter Gabriel). Not so with Passenger Peru. These Brooklyn based sound sculptors use everything from train sounds and bird tweets (‘Tiger Lily’) to cult preachers talking backwards (at least that’s what it sounds like to us in ‘Heavy Drugs’), and end up with a quality record celebrating planet Earth, but without ever forgetting to serve up fun old indie rock while at it.
In this self titled debut LP, Justin Gonzales and Justin Stivers share vocals and instrumental duties, conjuring up tracks that are at once pensive in tone and eclectic in form. With their internal understanding of how much better the world sounds inside of a green cassette tape (that’s the format of choice), the duo winds up with something resembling at times a fuzzier, crazier version of XTC, at others Animal Collective taking Beck out to the prom and keeping him up way past curfew. Truly an exciting and one-of-a-kind experience, the record abunds in sonic eclecticism, but manages to sound uniformly produced, which is a noteworthy achievemt for what seems like a mostly self-recorded effort (Stevers mixed and mastered the album). Even though it is missing a truly explosive single, we recommend Passanger Peru’s debut LP to anyone on the hunt for sonic surprises. Check out epic jam "Haelth System" below and see what things sound like on the other side. – Mike Levine (@Goldnuggets)
This band submitted their music for coverage here.