County Grind is counting down 2011's best local albums in South Florida. Monitor our progress here.
Knowing SoFla quartet Young Circles' back story might make listeners suspect. All the name changes (Stonefox/Blond Fuzz), shifts in personnel, and sonic adjustments could suggest that founding members Jordy Asher and Jeff Rose might just be bipolar. We are not ruling that diagnosis out entirely, but such schizoid schisms work to perfection under their current reincarnation in Young Circles' experimentally inclined full-length debut Jungle Habits.
In this album, front man Asher chooses drum machines over his six-string and takes a couple of doses of whatever Animal Collective's Avey Tare and Panda Bear took when they crafted 2007's brittle-but-dreamy Strawberry Jam to create a batch of songs that are extremely cerebral but also agree with the beat selection.
Tribal-ish beats dominate the first two numbers, "Triangles," and "Devil." The latter dishes out a very danceable brand of neo-psychedelia that
rivals the Stone Roses' glory days. Asher's sinister timbre hinting at
the majesty Ian Brown captured on such electronic shoe gaze classics as
"I Wanna Be Adored" and "Fools Gold." "Summer Nose" simmers down the
tempo until reaching the album's most ambitious track "Love Hitch,"
nearly eight minutes worth of trilling waterlogged catharsis that
teeters between brilliance and lunacy.
Some may say Asher and
Rose are crazy for dramatically shifting from their tried and true style
of scuzzy garage rock to a less approachable form of ambient, textured
indie, but we say they might be crazy as foxes.
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