If I wanted a mud bath I would've gone to a spa. I mean, yeah, I'm all strung out on stress and I'm sure my skin could use a little exfoliation after all these months of swampy summer air; a trip like that might do me some good. I could come back all rejuvenated, ready to take on the world with a newly relaxed viewpoint and ultra-healthy skin. It'd be like in those Bioré ads! Yet, despite not having done any of this, I'm still being subjected to a heavily applied bath of sludge. The production on Caesura's debut album's what I'm talking about, and it's not helping my skin any, much less my poor, bloodied ears.
This upstart San Francisco trio really deserve better sound, too, which makes listening to this album all the more frustrating. Instrumentally speaking, Caesura (named for a breathing point in natural speech rhythms) hang together pretty damn tight, blasting home a broad range of inventive, complex arrangements for the standard rock trio of guitar, bass and drums. Never mind that it's frequently difficult to tell the difference between the guitar and the bass on the album, these guys play with focus, and it's their strongest point.
For proof, you don't even have to listen past "For Staged Encore," the band's opening salvo of nonstop riffage and distorted, barely audible vocals. Rather than engage you with a melody or some sort of memorable musical motif, though, the band attempts to trample you under foot, moving rapidly from passage to passage and through a disorienting series of tempo shifts that, while well executed, don't amount to a hill of beans in substance.
Equally charged rhythmically, "Enter, Fluorescence" is more focused compositionally, but there's still no real hook to hang your hat on, and the production is unrelentingly brown and undefined. Then there's the matter of the song's title and its odd placement of a comma. Who, exactly, is Fluorescence? All I know is that back in the 80s I entered a fluorescent jacket every day and all it made me was a fashion victim. I wouldn't go so far as to call the guys in Caesura fashion victims, as I basically support this post-punk renewal thing they're musically tied to, but they do seem to be the victims of poor planning, making their small mark on a trendy scene with a sound that's only about 60% fleshed out.
There are thirteen other songs on this album, but to talk about them would be to repeat what I said about the other two. At every turn, the band throws down an impressive, heavy rhythmic attack and forgets to add a building to the foundation. Vocals are buried either by distortion or by simply being mixed to low to be heard-- though, listening closely, it's clear that the parts aren't very engaging anyway. Guitarist/vocalist Evan Rehill has enough vocal control and ability to rate as 'promising,' so it's a mystery to me why the band and engineer Aaron Prellwitz have decided to marginalize his voice so much.
The band does take a couple of admirable shots at expanding their sound, but they come off as throwaways, like the 50-second percussion interlude "Compromise in Theory." "Auxiliary Engine" is mostly a standard-issue Caesura tune, but contains a few surprisingly clean moments where the blanket of fuzz is lifted to let the clean, melodic bass playing of Brad Purvis (great name!) to the fore. "Assassin Assassin" is an oddly chaotic instrumental that alternates quiet, clattering passages with noisy explosions where all of the instruments bleed together. Again. But this time even more than usual.
Despite those few sidesteps, though, More Specific, Less Pacific is an ultimately monochromatic affair compromised by dirt-bound recording that only occasionally allows any space in the mix, and then never for long enough. The album slams shut with the aptly named instrumental "Brown-Out," which is technically proficient enough to reinforce the notion that Caesura can do better than this. With any luck, they will in the future, but for right now, they could help themselves out by hiring a producer who can clean some of the mud off.
