"Queens" is even a bit house-y, a Daft Punk style tremelo wobble. "Move your groove thing/To keep your soul intact." A party tune: handclaps and swirling loops. And some gorgeous lush bassline. It's a lush album this, very vegetative and tropic. A Seattle hothouse, and not something I could have imagined appearing on SubPop back in those twenty years ago.
"Existinct" goes back to the manipulation of jazznoises to form a soft/hard backdrop to the vocals. It's the sensation I associate most with the band: hard/soft - chewiness. Most of the tunes are pretty short too; the whole album is less than thirty minutes in all. "My melanin is relevant/It's something to be had" they assert on "Deeper" over some quick-step dub with laid-back alarm sounds. That hard/soft thing again. "Juiced" sounds just as you might imagine, wordless and exhausted.
"God" lopes beautifully again, stretched across a hardbop piano. (Is that correct? I don't know jazz. It's only something I can describe from the outside.) "Enchantruss" has some ancient keyboard sounds, wheezing and grasping at the future, while the words are hard to follow: "We time travel in nightmares/..I think of Archie Bunk". "Needs" may even crank up the slinky, laid-back-bongo-funk dial to the highest point while they chant "I need to prove myself" over and over.
"Crash" is a very simple piano line, chopped up and glitched very slightly, while some binary lyrics go "zero" and "one". Reaching out to that notoriously-difficult-to-crack Skynet audience perhaps? Then "Naturale" closes the album amongst clashing martial samples and the lasses bigging up themselves as "Queens of the Stoned Age/And princesses of time". Glacial poise but full of warmth.
The link is from NPR for a wee while - here! . You really should have a listen, as it sounds a bit like a lot and exactly like nothing. The sweet spot in the middle.
Rating: Funky out of Lush
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