Uncut began as a two-piece electro-punk band, but in recent years have re-fashioned themselves as the latest contenders in the post-punk revival championships. When vocalist/guitarist Ian Worang lost his techno-savant partner Jake Fairley to Cologne, he assembled a trad four-piece using friends from the Canadian music scene. As a result, Worang moved away from the computer-base of the band's origins and embraced the jagged guitars and floating withdrawal of post-punk.
This refashioned quartet more than makes up for its losses on its debut, Those Who Were Hung Hang Here. Combining dieseled guitar lines with Worang's gauze-covered vocals, the band's forceful sound and savoir-faire carve nuances into a genre that by now has little room for invention. The splintered guitar lines and sang-froid drums of "Understanding the New Violence"-- originally released as a club single in the Worang/Fairley days-- flirt with the innovation/revival dichotomy. An insurgent bassline is laid over Worang's whispered vocals, thickening the mix to murky, unfathomable depths before the song finally comes to terms with its unaligned angst and gives in to clamorous rebirth, searing itself into the album's icier moments. On "Buried with Friends", Worang spits sweet nothings with the detached declasse of the urban pedagogue. But this ain't your diag drunkard's diatribe: There's a quiet disgust to Worang's intellect-- he'd rather moan than shout.
Against black-eyed guitars and hazy post-punk dimness, Worang's vocals encircle you as though they were piped in from an all-night cafe, and it's this Interpol-like sound that the naysayers will surely seize upon when writing them off. Unfortunately, the band's few missteps have nothing to do with their likeness to the atmospheric NYC rockers. Rather, most of the blame falls on the ideas left over from Fairley's days: Seven of this record's 11 tracks prominently display his influence, which doesn't mesh well with Uncut's revamped sound.
"Copilot", for example, begins with wheezy synthesizers and a plodding beat, while "A Summer Day" sputters atop a techno twitch that could have come from a previous recording session. In these schizophrenic moments, Worang seems to be trying to both remain true to the origins of these songs and reconfigure them to work best within the dynamics of his now four-piece band. It doesn't always work, but when it does Those Who Were Hung Hang Here reminds us that it's still possible to create thrilling music on those old dog-eared vinyl copies of Closer.
