Pitchfork

"I feel like Psychocandy is the last significant event in pop music production," the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt told The New York Times recently. "It's the last album that sounded shockingly new, to me anyway." Although that statement woefully overlooks huge advances in genres from hip-hop to electronic and experimental music, while also seriously underrating the best achievements in pop and rock over the past couple of decades, it's an understandable way for someone like Merritt to feel. Particularly in an era of overtly Jesus and Mary Chain-influenced noise-poppers from New York's A Place to Bury Strangers to Leeds, England's the Manhattan Love Suicides. Fronted by singer Caroline McChrystal, the latter quartet emphasized the tender vulnerability cocooned within the JAMC's violent feedback barrage on their 2006 self-titled debut and last year's sadly underrated Kick It Back 7" EP, both on Portland-based Magic Marker.

The squealing clamor of Psychocandy or follow-up Automatic continues to crash into the Manhattan Love Suicides' C86-tinged melodic sweetness on "Heat and Panic", from the group's forthcoming Clusterfuck 7" EP on Leeds' own Squirrel Records. Now that such noise no longer shocks us, it works, as Pitchfork's Jason Crock wrote of Ohio rockers Times New Viking's fuzzed-out production, "like a security blanket-- a way of creating not just a distinctive sound, but of putting up an awning of safety over them and their listeners." Considering the sugary bubblegum lyrics and McChrystal's girlish twee-pop vocals peeking out from amid all that gorgeous racket, it's a kind of safety that suits the Manhattan Love Suicides well once again here. And that's not a distortion.

Stream:> The Manhattan Love Suicides: "Heat and Panic"
[from the Clusterfuck 7" EP; due in late February on Squirrel]