Amazing Baby - Rewild
I was listening to Amazing Baby's album, Rewild, while riding a bus through a torrential thunderstorm in the Catskills. It had been mostly sunny for the beginning of the journey, but at some point I looked out the window and there was this enormous ugly writhing mass of black clouds ahead of us. The rain hit hard and lightning flashed from every direction, though the thunder was nearly drowned out by the roaring of the rain, the bus, and the road. All this while I had been listening to Rewild. I had recently bought it from iTunes and hadn't really listened to all of the songs yet. In the most basic sense, I would describe the band as a more guitar-based fractal of MGMT that has been increased by a few dimensions -- with equal likelihood of spinning off into a beautiful, organic design, or crudely overlapping itself into an unattractive mess (which, not coincidentally, does also describe MGMT's lower-dimensional sound).
Technicalities aside, Amazing Baby's flavor of the fashionable clusterfuck hipster dance party psychedelia does seem to jab at an elusive organ of human nature. The songs are crisp and powerful, and there is enough echo on the vocals to distract you from paying too much attention to the actual words being sung. The lyrics, mind you, were also the last thing I would have been paying attention to, as our driver fearlessly bucked and wrenched the bus through a blinding downpour and what I was convinced was a flash flood. Though undeniably pretentious, Rewild on some levels manages to capture the magnitude of the human experience, in spite of song titles like "The Narwhal," which I am pretty sure features a choir of eunuchs rehearsing Eastern scales. There is some kind of honesty to the songs -- though many of them are a bit too coarse and awkward to try to swallow whole, they certainly don't pretend not to be. There's quite a bit of heart to 'em. Progressive could be the sympathetic way to describe it.
Not long afterwards, I had the chance to catch this band live at the Pier 54 summer concert series. Though I have to say the performance was mediocre, the band certainly gave it 120%, and they were by no means modest about voicing their respects to the main act, Yeasayer. Maybe they are trying to be a little more than just cool.
