split

Black Vatican
split
locust108
180 gram LP
2008-05-13

In this arranged marriage of sorts, Brooklyn's True Primes & Iowa's Black Vatican each turn in a side of kindred primal now wave on this split vinyl only record. True Primes, our beloved Shaggs of noise pop, keep it in the red, turn on the damage and deliver a side of wiggy aggro vocal moans, broken beats & confounding electro grit . It's all so very dystopian & punk but we know Che & Rolyn will get over it.

Not so with Black Vatican - the duo of Andy Roche & Owen Gardner -who make their locust debut here after a sweet cassette. Over their six cuts, they take a few cues from classic Suicide & Pere Ubu sides, make utopia, mercy & perversion a playground for Roche's crooning vocalese, and ride the austere white light of metronomic beats, minimal electronic sunshine melodies & arrested guitar strangulations, triangulations & thwacks.

A steal at nearly 60 minutes of music.

reviews:

Baltimore-by-way-of Iowa duo Black Vatican make some wonderful racket, its fried AM radio trashed pop jams recalling recent outings from Ariel Pink's aggressive bottom-of-the-well lo-fi, Panda Bear's Brian Wilson-toting crooning vocal serenades, and, certainly, not-so-recent Pere Ubu. You can hear things frying and being abused--what sounds like kitchenware percussion; big, echoed electronic "zonnngggs;" a rupturing, or close to it, speaker diaphragm. During "I Don't Want to Fight" the drums, vocals, and tortured surf guitar distort into each other, almost becoming indistinguishable, before clearing like a summer drive-by thunderstorm.

As a whole, it's quite fun and bop-able. - Baltimore City Paper

Black Vatican moans in the bedroom, one-man style like so many other lonesome types of late, but with a little more sonic interruption than others, and a refreshing lack of chops – a stumbling guitar line is just that, not some Cure song that the dude was sitting on for his entire adult life. Hard not to recommend - Dusted

the real stunners on this mini-LP are Black Vatican, two boys from Des Moines, Iowa—one of whom looks like the Scottish kid from Rushmore, the other of whom looks like either of the Proclaimers—who sing pleasant melodies beneath surprisingly pleasant layers of harsh feedback and modulated sine waves and drums that sound like they’re being played down the hall in a church basement. I bet this is how all those heroin bands like JAMC hear themselves rather than the aural equivalent of a yeast infection. - Vice Magazine

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