Portland-based Eat Skull debuted in 2008 with Sick to Death, a noise-pop record heavy on noise and light on pop, scuzzier and more feedback-driven than just about anything else that could be grouped into its subgenre. Over the past year, noise-pop has seen a vast resurgence, growing in popularity in ways most of us didn't anticipate. And with so many of this year's most talked-about artists (Wavves, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and others) adding varying degrees of murk to pop melodies, it's getting harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. Though they've toned down their approach ever so slightly with sophomore LP Wild and Inside, Eat Skull remains the scuzziest of all, and shows us here why they're still one of the most intriguing acts operating in this style.
To say that Wild and Inside sounds "clean" would be a stretch, but what's immediately noticeable here is the album's lack of excessive noise, the squeals and screeches that dominated so much of Sick to Death. Eat Skull (and frontman Rob Enbom, in particular) seem to have matured as songwriters and they're more capable of using noise as a tool, another instrument, rather than relying on it as the sole foundation for their material. That much is clear on the record's decidedly poppy front- and back-ends. Stellar opener "Stick to the Formula" and neighboring "Heaven's Stranger" strike a fine balance between 1960s garage-rock and the sugariness of early Flying Nun acts the Clean and the Chills, adding a uniquely crusty, folksier quality that lends the songs distinctiveness.
This shift towards pop (and again, that's a relative term here) gives the band more room to breathe. It lets them tinker with other styles, too, and most of this experimenting takes place in the record's quirky midsection. Eat Skull daringly ventures into a stretch of haunted Americana here and manages to pull it off; they wind up sounding like a spookier version of fellow lo-fi crusties Woods-- not a bad thing. Unexpected detours really open up on third or fourth listen (Wild and Inside is undoubtedly a grower); tracks such as the funereal "Talkin' Bro in the Wall Blues" display a welcome adventurousness not found on Sick to Death. Similarly surprising (and appealing) is the ominous coastal instrumental "Surfing the Stairs" and "Happy Submarine", which plays like a psych-garage reimagining of Grouper's from-the-bottom-of-a-well shoegaze.
Just a few patches of Wild and Inside aren't as successful. It's hard to imagine many folks loving the minimal dirge "You're With a Thing", which subsists mostly on a simple drum-machine beat and organ squelches. And other times Eat Skull's penchant for quirkiness borders on kitsch, like on "Cooking Our Way to Be Happy", a track about, well, cooking. (A cute song, sure, but lacking the staying power of catchy late-album standouts "Dawn in the Face" and "Oregon Dreaming".) Such lapses are few and far between, though, and shouldn't spoil much one's enjoyment of the album. The real question, I suppose, is whether or not listeners will give this record the room it needs to develop, or if kids new to this wave of noise-pop will make the jump to Eat Skull's much weirder sub-strain. It's hard to say: We Twitter-era fans are generally a pretty fatigued and impatient bunch. Those who do carve out some time for Wild and Inside, though, are likely in for a treat.
