“I’ll make you my beast: I’ll make you my prize.”
When Irene Barber–lead singer of Eighteen Individual Eyes–utters those words on “Octogirl”, the second track from the band’s great debut full-length Unnovae Nights, she delivers them with a siren’s allure. The clarion beauty of her voice provides the darkly-tinctured honey that sweetens the angry passions pulsing within those lyrics, and within the Seattle quartet’s instrumental attack. It’s a hungry kiss, delivered with a sharp bite that draws blood.
That exquisite tension runs restlessly all over Unnovae Nights. Cliff’s-edge romanticism, surreal nightmare imagery, and sucker-punch forcefulness intertwine so unpredictably that when Barber sings, “I like the way you dance/I like the way you twist,” you don’t know whether she’s referring to the seductive movements of a lover, or a body swinging on a noose.
Call EIE’s sound gothic math rock. Jamie Aaron’s guitar shifts between swirling goth textures and choppy post-punk riffing, alternately slow-dancing with and scraping against Barber’s voice. Bassist Samantha Wood and drummer Andy King, meantime, form a muscular and unpredictable rhythm section (it’s impossible not to love King’s skittering rimwork and Wood’s urgent low end on “Strawberry Cemetery”). And Barber’s a terrific lyricist, deftly balancing the surreal and poetic with a vein of coital directness. The net result reconciles dreamy shoe-gazer swooning with jagged fury so brilliantly, you wonder why more bands haven’t forged a similar path.
Ironically, one of the album’s biggest assets–the visceral work of producer Matt Bayles–occasionally becomes a liability. Bayles knows how to bring punch and rawness to a band’s sound (he’s done similar honors for Cursive and local boys Minus the Bear), but a few of the tracks might’ve benefited from a slightly lighter touch. Fortunately, even when Bayles mixes King’s drumming to almost overbearing heaviness, Aaron’s lush wall of guitar atmospherics and Barber’s soaring voice emerge to save the day.
There’s plenty of competition for the best cut on Unnovae Nights, but right now the one that’s embedded itself in my brain most insistently is “Rosebud Youth.” Aaron’s guitars veer between shrieking noise and ragged beauty; Barber and Aaron belt out their most intoxicating vocal harmonies (they sound like an indie-rock Cocteau Twins here); and King and Wood pound out a rhythm that throbs like an accelerated, love-struck heartbeat. It’s the exhilarating, slightly scary sound of every all-or-nothing crush you’ve ever felt, replete with the faintest taste of blood at the corner of a bitten lip. And it rocks.
