
THE FALSE DMITRYS: Pear Shapes
By Casper Jensen
An album of murky art-school pop with quirky hand drawn graphics and liner notes and lots of brief interludes between crafted songs. Self-produced by band members Brent Willis, Heath Neilson and Matthew Hadfield along with a few guest musicians at various locations in Lyall Bay and Waikane in 2011, this CD boasts 26 tracks and specialises in jarringly disjunctive pop and lo-fi garage rock melodies amid guitar noise and peculiar vocal concepts. Standout tunes include Girl Next Door which mixes the mundane with the sinister and creates some original, captivating music. The outré sense of dread on Surgery Won’t Solve All Your Problems shows a certain mastery of atmospherics and Waiting Again deserves note for its acoustic groove and vocal hook, providing contrast for the mostly fuzzed out tones on the rest of the album. Overall, ‘Pear Shapes’ suffers from a lack of clarity on the vocals, and the vocal production in particular doesn’t allow the listener to get closer to the songs.
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