It's slicker than indie usually allows itself to be. It glides across tarmac like its ice. Scorches through the desert like its water. Phrases that you normally slap onto an album like ‘dynamic’ and ‘punchy’, feel as dull as the bumper stickers on your once-hip uncle’s car. Dated rather than inaccurate. A step apart from what's happening here. Two Wheels Move The Soul is to Robber Robber’s previous output – and American indie in general – what origami is to paper.
It’s the same material inverted and subverted into wondrous new shapes. There's no new fancy tools here; the core songwriting remains that same sweet sound of emotive personal slacker rock, but the dynamics and techniques are a world away. But it's not overstated, it's not flashy, it's slick. No trickery or winks because there's nothing here to hide. Rather, everything simply shines.
That shine in part comes from the raw sound of the thing. Two Wheels is a distinctly twinkly record, easing off the semi-shoegaze distortion of its predecessor in favour of mathy duelling riffs. Touches of Women’s style of indie math slacker riffs show up, but so do touches of everything across this miniature beast. Grooves beckon between motorik and dance, but occasional basslines bring out a deep-fried funk. Shoegaze does rear its head on occasion, but more as an element of contrast than a focus. Across it, singer Nina Cates' voice takes on a sharp dream quality. The slacker laissez-faire is exchanged for something equally earnest and unnerving. Crucially, there’s a lack of fidelity to genre. The whole album a rush of odd-timed psychedelia. Each song renders the band as craftsmen, carefully selecting tools to best accentuate the angles. That core American indie sound of noise-pop pomp is dissected here. The songs are pieces of sugar and light sandwiched between industrial-grade noise. It’s indie neo-psych pushed to its extremities.
Recorded in the same studio and with the same engineer as their debut, the tracks have a sense of experience and insularity that allows for sleek evolutions. "Avalanche Sound Effect" begins as a reconfiguring blur of industrial percussion and guitar twinkles, that emerges into cascading riffs of breezy psych. The Tender "New Year's Eve" is a delicious mix of gurgling bass and guitars that alternate between jangling and scorching. The songs are so tight in their dynamics that Cates’ nonchalant Lou Reed-style spoken-sung vocals, appear as air gasping out between the gears. On "It’s Perfect Out Here In The Sun", a tight mechanical groove combines with near-no-wave guitars to crush her voice down, to a haunting gurgle ever on the edge of exhalation. Through this tightness, the moments of sweetness become pure honey. Shoegazing climaxes feel like sugar injected directly into the throat. The noise itself is addictive in its rhythms and repetition, perfectly calculated to feel more entrancing than oppressive.
The album's best moments are often when they embrace the noise. Opener "The Sound It Made" is a delirious piece of noise rock driven by crashing breakbeat drums. Cates sprechgesang vocals are a series of half-finished tales, that break away for breakdowns that sound like the track deconstructing and reconstructing itself mid-moment. The glorious "Pieces" has the guitarists play against each other, one laying down a thick layer of distortion, the other a nightmare twinkle. The tension comes close to release on the chorus, as the bass lets out a churning swamp-funk riff against the guitars' piercing joint shred. There's a palpable sense of dread here, one peaks on the title track. Mathy intertwined guitar lines riff around each other, never quite aligning in an uncanny manner, a minute in the bass strikes a head cleaning grind, and the vocals turn a near ethereal bend. "Watch for infection", Cates repeats in a haunted drawl, like a warning from the ghosts of a plague that’s come back to kill a thousand more.
It’s a high-tension record, as catchy as it is unnerving but rarely gloomy. On moments like "Again", they shed the dread nearly entirely in favour of excellently written personal pop. A song like "Talkback" could be seen as a masterclass on indie dance floor. The focus here is rarely on one thing. Strands about alienation and personal miseries intermix with the classic pleasures of indie excellence. Two Wheels Move The Soul is more than anything else an indie record pushed towards a position of excellence. Everything accentuated but never to the point of melodrama. Each song's effect has been pushed to its very best, but the core charms remain in that slacker elusiveness where the efforts are never overstated. It’s not polished, but it's chromatic, jagged, yet it jangles. It’s the sort of record that skates across a pond, leaving no marks, but the ice collapses moments after it graces it.
