Review Summary: Creepily gentle, kindly unsettling
I can't say that I haven't got my fair share of STDs.
But that has nothing to do with how much I love this EP! Brooklyn based quartet or quintet or whatever this is has found the perfect balance between melody and experimentation, beauty and eeriness. Led by the charismatic and ghostly voice of Alena Spanger, Tiny Hazard has crafted an art-pop EP that's very unabrasively avant-garde: weird and unique, but not in a way that's unpleasant to listen to. The arrangements are sparse most of the time, but they occasionally explode in a very noisy and dissonant amalgamation of sound that's very reminescent of King Crimson's Larks' Tongues in Aspic. The vocal melodies often sound untethered from the western understanding of tonality, they move around in chromatic scales, tritones and minor ninths are not hard to come by, but every now and then the listener receives a recognizable melody in a standard major or minor scale, which feel extra comfortable in the middle of an ocean of melodic tension.
The production truly makes the music shine: the mastering is done tastefully, it highlights the dynamics of the performance and it's part of the reason why it's so easy to be carried along this dream-like journey through the liminal landscapes of the songs. Also, did I mention the top-shelf musicianship? No? Ok then, there's some serious top-shelf musicianship in here. All the members studied at Berkley (I'm making this up to be honest, but they might have, who knows). Frantic piano chordioids are delivered from this harmonic mist as a gift from an alien civilization, droplets of luminous rain condensed from the ethereal quantum field of the oh come on, what the hell am I talking about? I'm really not cut out for this. I'll just say that their following records make greater use of synths, and they kind of lost the gentle touch of this EP, but they're not bad. Do listen to this EP though, it's only 20 minutes long and you'll do yourself a huge favor.
By the way, I accidentally bough 45 pounds of pigeon feed and I'm trying to get rid of them. I put it on ebay, let me know if you're interested, that would be great.
https://tinyhazard.bandcamp.com/album/tiny-hazard
