Weirdo Rippers

's opens with a perfect example of the band's very Californian kind of avant noise pop: it coasts in on static that sounds like crashing surf and guitars that drift in with the tide, then kicks into gear with a harshly pretty melody so bright that it glares like midday sun on the sidewalk. Later on, sounds a little like a lost track from , weathered from being left out on the beach for 40 years. The L.A. gallery punks' early singles find them working within a palette of different kinds of noise, whether it's the blade-like shards of it that slice through the stuttering, splattering blasts that push forward, or the aptly named ' waves of distortion, which undulate like heat shimmer. There are a lot of layers to 's music on , both literally -- especially on where piles of hazy feedback coalesce into drums and chanted vocals that are equally dreamy and wild -- and figuratively: and list , , and contemporary painters among their influences, and even when their music is bold, it's rarely simple. are just as likely to thrash out on as they are to engulf listeners in an abstract wash of sound like the oddly poignant However, it's when the band splits the difference, as on which intersperses a breezy melody with passages of raw noise, that are most compelling. Their collision of noise, punk, and pop could be contradictory -- and on songs like which begins as a roiling cloud of guitar textures, then unfolds into what sounds like a cover band playing underwater, it's certainly fragmented. Though they focused this mischievous, mysterious allure on represents 's creativity at its most freewheeling. ~ Heather Phares