Review Summary: I chop the sides away.
I went ahead and chopped the sides away
I think our very own BMDrummer put it best when he described Chavez as an ‘angular single-word post-whatever’ band. This puts them in good company (Unwound, Polvo, Fugazi, Slint, Silkworm, Shiner, Brainiac, Jawbox etc.) and, more importantly, is an apt description. Chavez are quiet and spidery. Chavez are quick and skronky. Chavez are catchy and slightly theatrical. I like them. They play with earnestness and irony and all the little sandpits the aforementioned bands carved out for themselves.
Now, by my reckoning, a lot of the bands above were quite singularly focused whereas Chavez fiddled around. For example, Jawboz were a punk band through and through. Polvo were a twiddly-diddly high-pitched math-skronk band. Brainiac were electro freaks. Slint were a sneaky sneaky i'm-so-quiet-BUT-LOUD weaponized sadboi-poetry delivery mechanism. But Chavez took a little bit of all these completely made up hyphenated descriptions and crafted one super-hyphenated identity, a sort of german-compound-concept-word-genre-agglutination of 90s indie-spectrum buzzwords. Also the vocalist has a gravelly voice and I like that because it makes the hard rockin parts more hard rockin.
