Afraid of the House has a lot of the same qualities as The Blind Shake’s material: buzzy lo-fi guitars, a chugging rhythm, noise rock distortion and a certain tense level that I described in an earlier blog post as “the bastard child of Jimi Hendrix and Jack White on a cocktail of ‘shrooms and amphetamines” (I was a little tipsy at a Blind Shake show when I wrote that). Despite that level of intensity, the flavor overall is a bit lighter, playful at times even. While the tracks “When You’re Down,” “Grow Like Rabbits” (my favorite on the album) and “Psychic Killer” are ferocious in the Blind Shake spirit, other songs like “I’m Just Sitting Here,”  “Back Home” and “Lonely Man” are almost bouncingly bright (in comparison. It’s still pretty intense), reminding me of some Sonic Youth songs from the early 90′s: noise rock with a nod to pop melody. I also dig the lo-fi psychedelic touches like the track “Not Even War” and the mini-instrumental “Green Curtains.”

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“Fresh Horse” and “All My Cells” on the A-side of the 7″ are, of course, also intense. Stomping beats, distorted and fuzzed guitars, noise rock yet with enough catchy melody to take the edge off the sinister vibe the songs convey. The B-side “The Day We Were Born” is, when compared to the flipside, practically straight-up pop, reminding me of the late 80′s/early 90′s Brit-pop scene, bright flower power garage rock sprinkled with a bit of 21st century grit.

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“I Shot All the Birds” appears on The Blind Shake’s 2016 Celebrate Your Worth (Goner Records). It’s sneering psych-surf, menacingly dense and swampy with a muscular industrial beat. “Tar Paper,” from the 2015 Fly Right LP (Slovenly Recordings) is a brutal stomper, a wall of sound draped with a cacophony of angry reverb.

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BLAHA “The Art of Not” 2017, Wet Bridge Records. BLAHA is one of the side projects of The Blind Shake’s and Shadow in the Cracks’ prolific Mike Blaha. We caught the band on Friday night at Acme Records in Milwaukee (along with local bands Fox Face and The Pukes) and picked up the new LP at the show, so this is the first listen. It has a similar dark intensity with touches of surf-psych like The Blind Shake (especially on “Home-a-less” and “Delicate Foreigner”) but with less density and speed. The instrumental “High Tide, Omaha Beach” is haunting and sparse, the title track “The Art of Not” is menacing with a hypnotic tribal beat while “Loneliness, I Love You” and “Gone Again” have flavors of indie shoe gaze meets alt-country honky tonk. The show was more raucous than this LP; I think many of the songs BLAHA performed were from their new cassette 499-456 (Kind Turkey Records) which we also purchased at the show and haven’t gotten a chance to listen to yet (I don’t trust our cassette players to not munch up the tape, so will probably do the download soon).

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