Just more than a year ago, MTV News' John Norris put together a short segment on lo-fi indie rock: It was hot. It was fresh. It was what the kids were getting into months before they were skewering Wavves on message boards. There were interviews with Times New Viking, No Age, and Jay Reatard. Somewhere in the shuffle were Tyvek, a goofy Detroit five-piece that, despite a "Buzzworthy" nod, seems to have stayed relatively subterranean. And if their posture, stage presence, or frontguy Kevin Boyer's on-camera quip ("You can buy our sound at Guitar Center") were any kind of indicator, they probably couldn't give less of a fuck. But you know, not in a Black Lips sort of way.
Big surprise then, that the band's debut full-length doesn't sound as though it's mangling your speakers. Coming to us via Siltbreeze-- a label whose releases have nearly always sounded as though they were recorded on speakerphone through curtains of snot-- the songs on Tyvek are relatively clean. They should be also familiar to anyone that had a chance to see them live in the past 18 months, as many of songs here were included on CD-Rs pressed for touring. And though cowlicks still pop up throughout, they rarely detract from the character or integrity of the songs and album as a whole. One of the only moments when sloppy doesn't seem to fit, opener "Circular Ruins" is a clenched, vein-y psych number that seems to substitute banging for just letting go.
Burners like "Summer Things" and the crispy "Hey Una" balance that equation, grafting layers of Feelies-inflected guitar melody onto runaway frameworks. Those same guitars detonate in the record's dangerous middle section, the cola rush of "Frustration Rock" and twin squiggles of "Stand and Fight"-- two standouts that really enjoy the bump in fidelity. As means for cooling down, the same Mexican-tinged track with rotating titles ("Sonora", "Tecate", "El Centro", and "Mexicali") offers brief interludes/beer breaks between the louder jams. It sounds like rehearsal noise from three rooms away, and if pressed, one might call it lazy. But it works, and if it didn't precede the near six minutes of flyover noise and Motor City malaise that is pseudo-closer "What To Do", I might long for it.
But the Big Kahuna is "Building Burning (Re-Edit)", a herky-jerk garage epic that, in a series of movements, meets its title halfway. Amps smoke. The bass bubbles up and pops. Boyer loses the dry warble and his shit behind the microphone, using up all his spit and juice by the time he's done. In a way, it exemplifies what's most fascinating about Tyvek and Tyvek. Here they steamroll their budget and continue imbuing their pop music with a menace that feels like it was already built-in. So often, that song in particular feels like it's about to overheat and come apart at its hinges. But it never does.
