(VxPxC)

I'm not super familiar with the work and history of L.A. trio (VxPxC) - there's certainly a lot of info out there, particularly a great Dusted overview and the band's own detail-rich site - so instead of digesting all that and regurgitating it here, I can just tell you that I really dug their one-track, 52-minute live contribution to Digitalis's Bottled Smoke series (there's a new one on Digitalis too that looks like a must-have), and I even more dig (nice grammar) their new six-song CD-r Lizard in the Spring, on my pal Eric's promising new Upstate NY label Tape Drift.

On my first coupla listens this rec sounded kind of sun-baked and beatific, despite the hazy production that immediately gives everything a kind of eerie, dark-cave feel...but lately I've started to realize that (VxPxC) are a lot more sinister than I initially gave em credit for. Maybe insidious is a better descriptor - these songs tend to creep up on you. They're patient and even relaxed on the surface, but burning and grinding down below, with an impressively pointed aggression that really digs into your cranium like a bug laying eggs in your ear while you sleep. Even a track like "Sidewalk Melter," with its seemingly laconic vibraphone clinking, has a cutting undertow that eventually turns into a truly haunting dissonance, much the same way that the hymnal organ drone on "In Day's Light" morphs into a buzzing saw, and the nearly song-like strumming on "Praying for the Regurgitation" slowly collapses into a woozy, nightmarish warp.

Of course, there's other stuff on Lizard in the Spring that's just flat-out menacing, my favorite being the horror-show lurch "Summergirls" (linked below), whose murky hypnosis I can't quite put my finger on. There's parts that are pretty and parts that feel random and almost inhuman, but from about half way through all the way to the end (VxPxC) constructs a vertigo-inducing stretch of aural imbalance and disorientation that must be what nausea would sound like if it felt good. The title slays me too - something about this dense, dark, dripping bit of heavy atmosphere seems paradoxically summer-ish, like waves of humidity rising from the blacktop and camping out between your ears.

mp3:
(VxPxC) - "Summergirls" from Lizard in the Spring