Balf Quarry [CD]

Magik Markers are the noise rock duo hailing from Hartford, Connecticut, comprising two core members in Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan. `Balf Quarry' is their first album on Drag City having previously released material on - among others - the Ecstatic Peace imprint owned by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, a band Magik Markers are often compared to. The album, named after a stone quarry in their hometown which has a "mined trap rock since the earliest days of the city", sees the band broaden their raw sound with a greater emphasis on mood and atmosphere.

The opener `Risperdal' begins with some impossibly fuzzy, low-end guitars, churning grimily while Ambrogio Patti Smiths-it-up, admirably failing to hit all the notes. With a deliberately scuzzy aesthetic, the song is redolent of the very dingiest gig venues - the distortion and reverb akin to listening to a band play live, but not from the front row but from some suitably piss-soaked, graffiti-defaced toilet cubicle. `Don't Talk in Your Sleep' features a ball-breaking, PJ Harvey-school diatribe from Ambrogio, over what sounds like the ominous rumblings of a Black Sabbath soundcheck . "Another woman can have the Devil's face ... anything you steal you're gonna pay for in spades, " she threatens, over a dank, menacing brew.

The rest of the album varies considerably, veering between the trashy punk of `Jerks' and `The Lighter Side Of ... Hippies', and distinctly more abstract pieces. `Psychosomatic' is a wonky ballad with faux-naive guitar plucks, needly fret work and dirge-like drones, with Elisa Ambrogio sounding a study in punk nonchalance. `7.23' is a kind of junkyard trip hop blues, all rusty scrapes and metallic clanks, while `State Numbers' is a bleakly funereal piano ballad with an icy wind blowing through it. Punctuated by swampy pulses, there is a sinister, mulchy undercurrent to the latter that recalls Angelo Badalamente's darker stuff for David Lynch.

`The Ricercar Of Dr Clara Haber' is three minutes of fractured guitar dissonance and almost jazzy drum freak outs from Nolan, while `Ohio R/Live/Hoosier' is liltingly discordant blues-rock that sounds like Jefferson Airplane's live strains drifting out over some mucky late 60s music festival. By contrast the epic closing dirge `Shells' is 10 minutes of almost baroque ambience in which the mists part mid-way for a spectral, folksy visitation by Ambrogio over twinkling piano and what sounds like the pocks of distant fireworks. More than a DIY curiosity but somehow less than a fully satisfying accomplishment, `Balf Quarry' nevertheless assures that the best of Magik Markers is yet to come. First published at The Line of Best Fit.