Vibe's a tough thing to nail; some got it, some surely don't. It doesn't stop a whole mess of bands from aiming to nail down the same vibes, among them the garage-throb in the Velvets/Spacemen 3 vein. Woven Bones work in that sound, as do fellow Austinites the Black Angels; mainstays like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Warlocks have long made the stuff their stock-and-trade. But on their debut LP, In and Out and Back Again, the airtight, breathless Woven Bones set themselves apart from every one of those bands by, well, somehow coming closer to the intangible qualities these groups valued from Spacemen, et al. in the first place.
Bones leader Andrew Burr's tunes are lean little rumblers, built around the thwack of the drum and the ceaseless thump of Matt Nichols' bass. They're so skeletal that 10 seconds of strum at the top of "7 Year Mirror" seems an eternity amidst all the go-go-go. Verses and choruses seem almost interchangeable, though there's hardly any time to decide which is which. These tunes seem almost too cool for melody, favoring instead a dry, mesmeric peal. You'd be hard-pressed to finger a highlight amidst these 26 svelte minutes, given the record's compositional tunnelvision, yet the effect's not samey but, rather, hypnotic.
Burr's voice sounds built for dirty rock'n'roll--all bratty disaffection somewhere between Iggy circa Fun House and Echo and the Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch. He and the Bones have a superior sense of economy-- there's no mistaking that these songs are built from just bass, guitar, and drums. Burr's not crafting true takeaway moments yet, but the mood In and Out carries seems to linger, and prolonged exposure pulls the dark curtains back a bit to shed a little light on these sneaky almost-hooks. It's that sullen mood, though, that's In and Out's greatest success-- it sounds lively, whipsmart, and half-drunk, like the band can't wait to set up and bum out. True, In and Out would be a better record were the songs a bit better defined, but its brief runtime and distinctly dingy feel go a long way to make up for any compositional shortcomings. This is garage-drone with a distinct whiff of carport about it, and that's just not a vibe you can convincingly fake.
