Steal Your Face, the second full-length album from San Francisco trio Mi Ami, is so intense it might overwhelm to the point of frustration. That's how I first reacted, struggling to find the same sort of entry points that its excellent 2009 predecessor, Watersports, offered. By contrast, Steal Your Face seemed too kinetic and overloaded to draw you in. It felt more focused on exploring the band's sounds than delivering a lasting impression.
Keep at it though: Steal Your Face is the sort of frantic, busy album that hides its hooks among fits of guitar savagery, dub textures, and ricocheting rhythms-- but only for so long. Mi Ami rips from the gates on opener "Harmonics (Genius of Love)", for instance. Singer Daniel Martin-McCormick stammers semi-intelligibly above a throbbing tom-tom beat (a pretty incredible music joke, given the title) and a rusty guitar riff that splits the difference between post-punk, post-rock, and stoner metal. "My body is so fucked, man, I just gotta move," he sings, while, appropriately, the band buries his words. It's as if Martin-McCormick is trying to find himself among the hot mess.
That's how the best of Steal Your Face works, by cramming every second with as many sounds and ideas as the trio can manage. Constant motion keeps the songs exciting, while the sense that there's always another layer you've yet to grasp is what recharges attention. On "Secrets", above a squealing guitar and a gut-punch bass, Martin-McCormick speaks volumes on bad drugs, guilty lust, and vacuous relationships, letting it all go in a curdling, 15-second scream that has the same effect as a sudden burst of harsh noise. Lined with Whitney Houston, Twitter, and white-guilt jokes, "Latin Lover" suggests the Fall finally looking good on the dance floor. And while it's possibly as straightforward as Mi Ami's ever been, "Native Americans (Born in the U.S.A.)" isn't an easy read, either: They march through six verses, pausing after each to restate a cooing hook or for Martin-McCormick to grind his guitar through the beat. The closing guitar solo-- 90 seconds of squeal and broken tones panning from speaker to speaker, fading only to reform-- feels like watching a street brawl.
Mi Ami's discursive and repetitive elements fortunately remain intact (just one tune clocks in at under five minutes), emphasized by the "Dreamers", the sole track here that couldn't be qualified as a rager. Martin-McCormick wraps his surprisingly muted whimper around trance-like rhythms and circular guitar. It's the third of the album's six tracks, meaning it's more of a chance for you to catch your breath than for the band to fade away. That's good, too, because Mi Ami seem only to be getting started: They've never been as good or as distinct as they are on Steal Your Face.
