Thom Waddill, frontman of Austin rock quintet Font, summons his lyrics in semi-conscious fits of instinct. Dream recall and automatic writing; scrawled poems and nonsensical muttering. Waddill seems to live among towers of haphazardly stacked pages—Cormac McCarthy essays and dog-eared Dostoevskys—clipping from them like a scissor-happy kid. The angular, polyrhythmic outbursts from his bandmates are just as reflexive, often built from the drums up during improvisatory practice sessions. On their debut album, Strange Burden, Font fuse grimy post-punk guitar, combustive percussion, and blazing synth riffs, committing roughly three years of evolving live sets to tape. They lose nothing in the process. Strange Burden is meticulous and crackling—a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning.
Font is populated by multi-taskers; most members dart between strings, synthesizer, or a sampling pad at any given moment. During gigs, bassist Roman Parnell and guitarist Anthony Laurence swap machinery with Waddill at the front of the stage, while Font’s two drummers, Jack Owens and Logan Wagner, dish out dueling rhythms in the back. Wagner stands while performing, and of course, also plays a sampler. This kind of dexterity only aids Font’s teeming arrangements, which dissect and reanimate a pile of hyphenated genres. But trying to identify Font’s music is a slippery business; post-punk, art-rock, dance-punk, noise-pop…they are all accurate but insufficient descriptors.
Font have been pretty up front about their influences: Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, and Radiohead have all been name-checked. But they are also channeling the warped disco of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, James Chance’s agit-jazz, and prog fuckery à la Squid and Black Midi. Font’s earliest singles are stirring and pushy. “Sentence I” is a twisted punk sermon spurred by Parnell’s elastic bass licks and Wagner’s thwacked cowbell. On “It,” Waddill contorts his voice between breathy yelps and ragged shouts, as Laurence’s guitar screeches like a circular saw gnawing through steel. The song is an early instance of Waddill’s absurdist humor:
It comes through the bodyIt opens the doorIt crawls up my leg while my mom’s at the storeIt insults my dadIt calls out for God**It suns on the deck with abandon
This faceless “It” is at first menacing, suggesting some kind of hostile, inhuman species. But the sudden swerve into a grocery store, and then a porch chair where “It” tans “with abandon,” feel like cockeyed portraits of the mundane. Most of Font’s songs modulate tension in this way, and Waddill is keen to conjure hyper-specific, mismatched visuals—as if he’s playing a solo round of Exquisite Corpse.
Waddill is fascinated with surreal and precise imagery, but many of his lyrics celebrate the pure musicality of words. On “The Golden Calf,” which lurches from downtempo ’90s alt to throbbing industrial, he sings of “breastlike curtains sagging burdens earthbound,” “fingering velour handbags,” and “asbestos in the narthex.” He has an innate grasp of poetic language. Slant rhymes and clashing consonants seem to spill out of him without sounding overworked. He manipulates his voice with similar ease—it can sound as taut and clean as platinum thread, or frayed like the edges of a wind-battered flier.
Clocking in under 30 minutes, Strange Burden is perfectly paced and sequenced, maintaining its charge as Font adjust their intensity. Amid the jittery beats and processed grit is “Looking At Engines,” a sneaky power ballad that could be sold to the 1975. Just picture the irreverent Matty Healy belting the song’s funniest line: “Your father eating peach pits like they were smaller peaches/He’s never seen the snow and I don’t think he knows what teal is.” It’s another taste of Waddill’s potent brevity. We have a small amount of strange information, but can easily inspect the character’s pores and fingernails.
But the crown jewel of Strange Burden is lead single “Hey Kekulé,” with its pulsing disco keys and crossfire percussion. Waddill penned the lyrics after reading Cormac McCarthy’s essay on the German chemist August Kekulé, who discovered the ring-shaped molecular structure of the chemical benzene when he dreamt of a snake eating its own tail. McCarthy’s piece examines the subconscious and its pesky habit of communicating in cryptic symbols. But Font flourish in this murky realm, and they are thrilled to receive all of the odd creatures that crawl out of it.
