Word: slantingly
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Fortunately (and I must admit I have a personal bias), some journalists are beginning to write articles with a gay-positive slant. The media plays a tremendous role in shaping public opinion...
Another thing: these songs the FAST. Slant 6 don't linger on a tune: they move on. It's easy to entirely miss a song or two (and to get surprised by the ones you missed when you listen to the album again). The short songs mesh well with the additional economy of instruments: here's a trio that sounds like a trio, that sounds like there's only one guitar going at once rather than trying as Big Star did to pick a famous example) to fill up the record with layers'n'layers of sound. The economy...
Another thing who do Slant 6 sound like? It's hard to say: the ordinary reference points for simple, fast, stripped-down, aggressive pop songs are old bands like the Buzzcocks, whom Slant 6 sound nothing like. Scrawl are the most obvious reference point--their early records were just as clear, economical, hummable and covertly sad as Soda Pop Rip, Off, though early Scrawl song were about half as fast. Other aural similarities are to Tallulah Gosh (the fast, sloppy, Oxford pop band that eventually became Heavenly) and to Boston's Salem 66, another riff-oriented all-female trio. Which...
...brings the amazing record I'm ostensibly reviewing into the same ballpark as the mediocre new Bratmobile EP, the great Heavenly 10" that came out last year, and whatever, Barbara Manning does next is that none of those artists seem to be operating as the jaded end of anything: Slant 6 songs, in all their compactness, open out into a new world of energy and experience, sort of the way Buzzcocks song did, and the way only few current pop bands in which the men sing the songs still do. (Exceptions: Sleepyhead and Small Factory. That's about...
...guitarist, Mary Timony, is now headed for deserved superstardom in her Boston-based band Helium. The various parts of Autoclave's sound--the instrumental overlaps, the soulfulness, the rapid riff-changing--are now split up among the bands its ex-members have formed: Helium songs are slow and cathartic Slant 6 song are speedy and compact, and Autoclave bassist Nikki Chapman's Rastro! is noisier than either other band. It's fair to say (and it's not a diss on Helium) that Christina Billotte's melodic sense must have been the dominant one in deciding what Autoclave tunes would...