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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