Like any lowercase music site, OBLADADA regularly gets sent music speculatively from a whole host of artists and labels. Our approach to this is simple, we give everything a chance. Fairly or otherwise, sometimes things don’t last long but for sounds that pass some odd internal filtering process, it’s like the music getting invited to live with us a while. It bounces around our speakers and brains, maybe soundtracks a forest walk, a garden beer, or a sofa zone out… We certainly don’t have the capacity to write about everything we enjoy but sometimes our thoughts do form into words, paragraphs, and reviews.
So recently, we received an unassuming message in our inbox direct from the artist, hit the attached download link and with no framing or previous knowledge at all – hit play. The 25-minute album then played in one uninterrupted hugely entertaining sweep and connected immediately deep within our brain. A rare treat.
Chitinous Mandible is a new project by New Jersey artist Tom Herman and whilst it’s undeniably short, it’s packed with all sorts of touches that you can immediately sense has been worked on with great detail and creative focus. It sounds like an album that’s every bit as good as several psych rock albums that have had way more budget and PR thrown at them…
Almost immediately the opener Covered Bridge establishes into a layered form of bedroom psych that propels it skywards. A thundering mixture of drums, bass and looping guitar with echoed vocals that flips between fuzz explosions and grooving propulsion. Connection In A Parking Lot, could be a reimagined theme from a 70’s cop show complete with funky details and breathy backing vocals, Summertime Drive is a mess of thrashing drums washing over everything.
Unknown Twin trips itself up in knots of drum rolls and bass lines. Things open into a calmer zone with the slow expansion of Scratch of a Pen, as layers ebb and flow through the whole thing. Time Designs quickly fleshes out into yet another twisting groove around a throbbing drone.
Barely 15 minutes into this disc, each track falls out the sky prefectly formed, fully realised, and bursting with a freshness that seems to elude countless others.
In these surroundings, the 5-minute stretch of Wheels, Pinions, Arbors feels vast and drifts by, before eventually realigning into a shuffling harmonica dappled finale. Everlasting Love is a woozy lounge closer that somehow feels like this whole whirlwind adventure shapeshifted into a time frame far longer and more detailed than any clock may display.
Whilst Herman was part of the band Arches, and previously worked under the name Old Smile, from the little we have heard subsequentially so far of each, they are also fascinating projects.
Chitinous Mandible might just be a refresh, time for a change, whatever the reasons, this new project is an exhilarating exercise in opposites – richly detailed music equally targeting miniaturisation and succinctness.
It’s also clear that the album has a warm homespun air, Herman explains his father plays drums on a few tracks, the sleeve collects family photos and presumably, all these threads somehow came together sumptuously in a bedroom studio. The music here is no copy and paste either, despite the trap that often makes albums like this patchy or derivative, or both, this avoids all that.
We are grateful this music found us, it’s hard not to immediately regard it as a superb, densely concentrated, and hugely refreshing dose of potent psych.
A very welcome addition, to soundtrack our summer…
Chitinous Mandible is out now, digitally and on limited edition cassette
A video of the entire album can be viewed here
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