Nautical Almanac - Cover the Earth

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Please, please don't ask me what the three members of Baltimore's Nautical Almanac are doing or how exactly they're doing it -- that is, how they're bringing these unnatural sonic etchings to life, giving harsher realms a crooked window into our own - because I just plain don't know, dude. I gave up trying to figure it all out back in 2004 while puzzling through their long-player Rooting for the Microbes and their limited-edition 3-inch CDr We're Stupid, And So Are You.. The trio of Carly Ptak, Twig Johnson and Max Eisenburg distill their bewildering homebrews using homemade instruments which - albeit extremely allegedly - don't require the use of electricity.

On Cover the Earth, the band skews more studio-based Wolf Eyes than their usual unfathomable, chaotic drabbling, tending more to the paletteable bizarro than ever before. Opener "Sevente Seven" is a crafty device; what at a reasonable volume appears to be several seconds of utter silence is in actuality a low-frequency bleed that seeps into "Megacorps'" same-level blips. After an alarmingly brief interval, though - as you strain to hear what's happening in your headphones, be careful of the volume setting as it could be hazardous, "Megacorps" fairly explodes in an uneven blast of ravaging ping-pong "beats," distorted, rack-stretched-taunt pleas for mercy, and rapidly exfoliating cries of outrage. And from there, the psyche blister just keep coming: "Leviathon" an uncompromising, sensory-overload scrapheap; "Rolling in the Green" finding Ptak absently, girlishly repeating the title, as is and with slight variations, over what sounds like a banjo being improperly tuned and the drummer from Storm & Stress drunkenly poking at his kit; "Stopstart" like dazed Muppets stumbling about in a frequency-and-perspective-gone-haywire blizzard. This is outer-limits perfection, the point where Nautical Almanac move up from a fascinating curio into a noise force to be reckoned with.