High Diving Ponies, “Face Blindness” cassette

cover - face blindness
Last Friday, Stephen Thompson answered a question regarding too much music on the All Songs Considered blog. I sympathized with the writer, because looking at the stacks of records, singles, CDs, and cassettes scattered about the basement, I feel that I don’t get a chance to really appreciate music the way I once did.

And, really, it doesn’t hit until you throw in a cassette by a local band — in this case, Kansas City’s High Diving Ponies‘ newest, Face Blindness — and realize that you’ve really enjoyed everything they’ve ever put out, but probably only listened to each release but once. And you’ve never seen them live? Seriously, how can you claim to enjoy a band when you’ve only listened to them 10% as much as you did Blink-182 as a teenager?

Face Blindness is, again, a big wall of sound from High Diving Ponies, but it’s tempered by what sounds like a lot of natural echo. It’s a live album, tonally — there’s a really nice sense of decay to everything, where the vocals and instrumentation have a chance to fade out and bounce back from distant walls.

On cuts like “Clairvoyant,” it’s more noticeable, since the higher pitch of Joey Henry‘s noise banjo (which is a fucking amazing addition) doesn’t fuzz away quite as much as the dream-like “Headlights” or “Living the Dream.” It’s a great effect, almost like evoking instant nostalgia. The distortion, both in terms of instrument tone, and the way Face Blindness appears to have been recorded, gives the entire record a sense of having come from before, rather than now.

Speaking of amazing additions, “Living the Dream” fades out in the fuzz of a modem connecting, and it’s so buried in the general dissonance, I had to rewind the tape a cuple of times to confirm what I heard. Hell, guitarist / vocalist Josh Thomas told me via Twitter exactly where the noise banjo comes in on “Living the Dream,” and I still can’t quite pick it out.

You can buy Face Blindness from High Diving Ponies’ Bandcamp, either on cassette (limited to 77 copies) or on a LightScribe CD-R with a spray-painted case (limited to 50 copies).