Thursday, August 02, 2007

Myspace: Birds of Maya

In response to Myspace's generic "sounds like" field, Birds of Maya state that they sound like "like a gg allin demo played through a megaphone." It's a fair description and it's certainly colorful, but it leaves out an awful lot. If they really sounded like dear-departed GG, I wouldn't be writing about them. They are loud and they are chaotic, but they have way more groove than GG Allin ever imagined.

"Porch Dude" sounds like it was probably recorded live. It gives a good idea of the sheer power emanating from the speakers, but loud alone doesn't make great music and it's hard to get much out of this one beyond hints of what might have been had the song's structure been better captured along with its volume. "Killer in the Snow" is Dark Side of the Moon by comparison. It's still a cacophonous mess, but it captures just the right amount of the song itself and mixes it with the unabated energy of the performance, creating a near perfect track that is so bluntly heavy that Blue Cheer might put in ear plugs. Still, the song moves along with a slow undeniable groove. It fades at the end, begging the question, "What else did it have to offer?" "Traveller" suffers from the same problems as "Porch Dude," but some of the manic guitar work still manages to come through and it is worth hearing even if the song struggles to rise above the poor recording. Low recording levels and bad mixing aren't enough to stop "Sleepwalker" though. The heavy groove soldiers on and feels like it'll smash your eardrums to bits even if you turn it way down.

Birds of Maya do have a bit of GG Allin in them, but more importantly they have a lot of Blue Cheer and the MC5 in them as well. Even those bands might be given a moments' pause at Birds of Maya. They have a full-length album coming in a few months on Holy Mountain and one can only hope that they don't rein in any of this power in the studio.

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