I’ve known about Laurie Duo for exactly twenty-four hours. Their new album, Day, appeared on a mutual’s Instagram story and, taken by its cover, I decided to investigate. What I found is that its two central members are Lifeguard bassist/vocalist Asher Case and Case’s alter ego, the guitar-wielding dandy Laurie Sara-Smith. For better context, imagine a collaboration between Patrick Flegel and Cindy Lee, or Sir Paul McCartney and Percy Thrillington.
Despite the fact that the first Laurie Duo EP, Early, was bounced between “a Dora the Explorer-sticker-plastered TASCAM 414” and a “very plain desktop computer,” “lo-fi” doesn’t feel like a totally apt description: those songs, especially “Laurie’s Loop 01,” sound like they’re genuinely disintegrating. Day, their full-length debut, is a more fleshed-out forty minutes. On Bandcamp, Case and Sara-Smith refer to the music’s setting as “the little pocket of bygone jazz-age bachelor pad once called Phantom Manor and now called Common Starling”—from The Haunted Mansion to a passerine songbird. I like how producer Lee Johnson called it on Instagram: “four days of February joy.”
Day is a hypnotic taste of 21st-century avant-garde: total band synergy threaded into incongruous melodies. The record never settles into anachronism, though various memories step out of the shadows during its runtime: Syd Barrett, La Monte Young, The Velvet Underground, the Don Cherry Orchestra if it was only the woodwinds. The music says enough with just a shrill, droning guitar, Lee Johnson’s bass clarinet, and Seamus Moore’s alto saxophone. Touches of Moog, organ, and drum machine appear, as does Eleanor Haller Ross’ voice on “You From the Front,” but the band distills its vaporous improv through minimal moving parts. After Sara-Smith, Case, Moore, and Johnson crawl through table synths, glassy strums, and woodwind ribbons on “You Live Upside Down Now,” the tracklist splits between eight-to-eleven-minute electroacoustic jazz suites and 180-second neo-psych-folk miniatures.
“Antedekade” is anchored by a coiling guitar and kick drum while Johnson and Moore’s instruments speak to each other in tongues. Eventually Sara-Smith’s guitar takes over, bending chords that breathe out like a brass horn. But the record rarely sits in one texture for long. “Song for Aman” is scratchy and psychedelically dilapidated, while husky, drop-tuned guitar noodles are upended by stabs of woodwind in “Dungeon Song.” “Motorcycle Rider” lights up in the lo-fi serrations of Slanted and Enchanted-era Pavement and post-Invasion Ray Davies. “Port Romance” sounds like two separate recordings chain-stitched together, as Sara-Smith strums her guitar at a glacial pace and Johnson’s clarinet (or Moore’s saxophone—I can’t quite tell) tangles itself into knots before bursting apart. The album’s centerpiece, “Cosey,” gives Moore eight minutes to unwind with Sara-Smith’s circuitous accents. She and Haller Ross duet in “You From the Front” before her chords dovetail into Johnson and Moore’s interlocked slap-tongue fury.
Day is not the same noise as the last Lifeguard debut album, Ripped and Torn, where Case’s basslines proved worthy compliments to Kai Slater’s saw-toothed guitar riffs. It’s more in line with the Ultra Violence / Appetite maxi single from earlier this year. Every song on Day is pulled in two, sometimes three different directions simultaneously. This isn’t rock music, but an experimental, feverish portrayal of physical repetition. Sara-Smith and Case build spirals from their guitars and drum machines, while Johnson and Moore counteract the discordance with woodwind dialogues that sit at the front of the mixes like lead singers. Laurie Duo have built their own sinfonietta—a phantom collaboration that’s near-mystical in its own slow deterioration. [Self-Released]
Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s Editor-in-Chief. They live in Los Angeles.
