Wednesday, April 6, 2011

"Courtesy"

Song: "Courtesy Is Considered as a 'Farce' If There Are No Honesty and Reality"
Artist: Te'
Search Term: "Courtesy"

Te' is a Japanese instrumental quartet who list expressively dynamic post-rock bands like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor among their influences, but you wouldn't know it from this sturdy, confusingly titled Brinks truck of a song. (I think someone must have used a shoddy online translation tool to come up with the English packaging of their debut, because the album itself has the perplexing name If That Is What Is Being Thought, Liberated Sound Talks the Depth of [Musical] World.) The thick, heavy bass and dexterous drumming--lots of clean, practiced high-hat rolls to complement the overdriven galumphing of the bass and snare--are straight out of the Flaming Lips' playbook, and an echoey guitar casually surfs in the rhythm section's sizable wake. In spite of the hefty bottom end and the fact that the whole composition boils down to a single riff, though, it moves with a surprising nimbleness that I think most listeners will find bracing if they allow themselves to get whisked up into its slipstream. I certainly dig it.

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