Eaters are a collaboration between two young men from Brooklyn, one named Jonny and one named Bob. Their music is dark without feeling oppressive and modern without ever feeling too slick. Most of their self-titled debut sounds like something that could’ve come out in the late 1970s or early ’80s, a period when bands nominally classified as post-punk started messing around with synthesizers, and peacocks like Brian Eno and David Bowie realized you could make rock that sounded cerebral and far-out without becoming Yes. The palette is gray, the vocals are real Teutonic. Think of it as pocket goth: A sullen, hooded tempest made at manageable scale.
Jonny, who in the interest of being official is named Jonathan Schenke, is an engineer with credits on albums by Liturgy, Frankie Rose, and most recently, Parquet Courts—all young rock bands that approach the idiom of rock music from very different perspectives. (Eaters has also been co-released on Dull Tools, a label run in part by Parquet Courts singer and guitarist Andrew Savage.)
Eaters, too, could be called a rock album, though with the exception of “Through All” and “The Way” it features few obviously discernible guitars, and most of its songs are shaped less like songs than like quasi-ambient miniatures that use the signposts of vocal melodies and propulsive drums to cover up for the fact that all Bob and Jonny really want to do is play with texture. And the textures on Eaters are beautiful: Grim and subdued but so rich you could raise tomatoes in them. More than any melody or song, it’s the sound of the album that keeps me interested. So while I recognize that “Bury the Lines” and “Through All” feel calibrated to be singles, they also feel beholden to convention in ways that weirder, looser experiments like “Icarish” and “This Is Round” don’t.
Along with bands like Merchandise and Total Control, Eaters seem like part of a microshift in indie music away from color and variegation to something comparatively austere. Call it a momentary juke back into modernism as we crest the Aquarian age. Maybe it’s just the comfort of the past—that almost quaint way young bands mine old sounds the way people down in Williamsburg, Virginia keep making candles just like they did in the bloodletting days. The quiet irony of Eaters is that it feels like a period piece for a time in music when so many things felt new.
