Cristi Jo and Jessica Zambri earned their first major notices when they showed up, quite suddenly, as back-up singers at Hooray for Earth's buzzy CMJ performance in 2010. (Jessica Zambri and Hooray frontman Noel Heroux are married.) The two bands subsequently traded remixes, resulting in the cleanly anthemic "Heather" and peculiarly incoherent "Comfortable, Comparable". The latter was a technological massacre: almost a cautionary fable about what it will sound like if our samplers rise up against us. It didn't raise high expectations for how the Zambri sisters-- talented performers, by most reports-- would fare as composers. Their debut EP, Glossolalia, is better, but it's still a distressing piece of work overall, stranded somewhere confusingly between experimental chaos and idiomatic pop.
A sliver of sweet-spot exists between those poles-- the Knife basically live on it. But it's hard to hit the head of a pin with a bazooka. Zambri's open warfare against any preconceptions we might have about their experimental bona fides makes Glossolalia a chore to listen to. As means to an unclear end, it stages clashes between brutishly misfiring percussion, keyboard lines so aimlessly broken they're barely melodies, and electronically treated vocal textures, all of which cooperate only haphazardly. Drifting somewhere in the morass are the spooky refrains that inevitably get called pop hooks. The seeds of sound ideas have trouble sprouting amid all the eccentricity of style, and the result is like Zola Jesus with a more prosaic vocal presence but plenty of funny noises to make up for it.
The actively unpleasant "On Call" is a strange choice for an opener, as its most substantial content is an erratic percussion track that literally sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. It's a loud machine made of random parts that doesn't actually do anything besides grind down its own ill-fitted gears. The inoffensive but plodding "Heather" is more structurally lucid but harmonically blurry, which makes it sound like a competent but imperfect mash-up-- just a hair off. The clarion exception is "To Keep Back", where the drum, keyboard, and bass tracks were clearly designed to go together, rather than seeming like a one-legged, seven-armed Frankenstein. It also helps that the anesthesia from the first two songs wears off, and the sisters start to really sing, with humanizing swing and soul, unfettered by robotic caveman and barnyard noises. It's not very "challenging," but it's a good, dark electro-pop song by any measure, and sounds fucking epic in the context of this slender, weedy harvest. They're really good at singing! The pains they take to undermine that talent are baffling.
While it doesn't reach the modest heights of "To Keep Back", the second half of the EP is much more sensible than the first. The bouncy "News" boasts interesting bass and melody bits made from filtered vocals, and a more palatable mystic-pop callback of the trainwreck opener probably should have just been the official version. Zambri are still promising-- we may just be hearing the growing pains of a new band figuring out what it's good at. This one seems unaware that its pop instincts are much sharper than its experimental ones. You can tell what they were going for from the title of the EP, which means speaking in tongues. But that has a double connotation of gibberish and inspiration. We get too much of the former and too little of the latter here.
