If a band makes two records that move their sound in the same direction, is it fair to call the first a step forward and the second a retread? No, it's not. So please don't call Balf Quarry a repeat of BOSS, Magik Markers' excellent 2007 album*.* I understand the temptation-- like its predecessor, Balf Quarry channels this duo's noisy leanings into simpler songs without sacrificing the band's fiery energy. There are even some direct parallels-- the best song here, the chugging "Don't Talk in Your Sleep", bears echoes of BOSS' single "Taste", while the raging "Jerks" recalls BOSS' "Body Rot". And when heard in light of a 20-plus release discography (including at least seven since BOSS), Balf Quarry certainly sounds more like BOSS than anything else the band has done.
But it takes only a few listens to realize that this album is its own beast. Even with healthy doses of unruliness and a few far-off wanderings, this is Magik Markers' most coherent, self-contained effort to date. A friend called it "a road trip into the basement," and that pretty well captures the album's America-in-the-rear-view-mirror vibe. As the smoky grooves roll by, it's easy to picture singer/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio and drummer Pete Nolan camped out in a cellar, dreaming that their loose, swaying songs are treks down a hazy, endless highway.
"Smash out the glass of the dashboard clocks/ Drive straight into the West," Ambrogio sings in opener "Risperdal", a diary of a country where "America's past pays America's rent" and "High schoolers and Haggard know what I know." (At song's end, Ambrogio changes that line to "High schoolers and Hagerty"-- perhaps a nod to Neil Hagerty and Royal Trux, a band who could also sound like they were concocting alternate Easy Rider soundtracks from the comfort of dank underground dwellings).
Elsewhere, Ambrogio drops numerous references to road-drenched Americana. Her songs are littered with gamblers, lawmen, whiskey, and losing lottery tickets. This makes Balf Quarry something like a 1970s indie film shot through a modern-day lens, similar to the way Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny felt like a simultaneously faded and updated road-movie replica. So you probably need some penchant for American nostalgia and noisy stoner-rock to dig very far into Balf Quarry. But if you can hack it, there are pots of gold along the album's wayward avenues.
On "Psychosomatic", clipped guitar and cutting drums embolden Ambrogio's screed against thinking too hard ("If you start looking, do you know what you'll find?") Later, a crunchy electronic beat buttresses Ambrogio and Nolan's vocal duo on the love-song-ish "7/23". That's followed by the even more surprising "State Numbers", a ballad about the dangers of gambling featuring Nolan on piano and producer Scott Colburn on "wizard wind." "Luck never gives, it only lends," Ambrogio warns over the music's haunting tones.
Her most pointed rant, "The Lighter Side of...Hippies", is an indictment of something bigger: 60s idealism. "You had a revolution in your head/ Too bad you couldn't make it out of bed," she snarls, telling the boomers that "your heroes lied." In fact, here she wholly rejects the road fantasies that Balf Quarry had hinted at before: "No more forever young on the turnpike/ The sunshine visions were not what they seemed." But even Easy Rider itself ended with Peter Fonda deciding that "we blew it," and the dreams and disappointments Ambrogio sings about are often intertwined. Balf Quarry is the kind of record that can handle such rich, entertaining contradictions.
