Pitchfork

There's something almost heartbreaking about Wzt Hearts' Heat Chief; the way that after an epic wait through neo-Boredoms drum triangulations and gravelly handfuls of laptop gusts the second track begins to play, quietly cutting out the noise and furor for the sake of a rather plain wet, processed guitar tone that, for the length of the track, is left hanging, out and up like a hymn.

Heat Chief is a record that makes no sense if not played on speakers, and on vinyl; the fidelity is otherwise too off, the editing and ideas too tentative. On headphones it's a claustrophobic nightmare, a petty collection of scrapes and wavering tones passed off as finished-- and only on wax, and loud, does it burst.

This Baltimore quartet, who pronounce their name "Wet Hearts," are-- like the newer Boredoms, the New Orleans guitar-sustain devotees Belong, or the mouth-breathing, om-ing New Yorkers Double Leopards-- in search of a kind of transcendence through repetition and incremental adjustments. They find it in their own way: Though they allude, convincingly and often, to the Boredoms' Seadrum/House of the Sun, their best moments are their most processed-- long, humid, sustained tones and almost desultory, lagging, melodic progressions.

In one spot static, drenched in echo, cascades over the circled drum patterns spun out by Shaun Flynn; in another, ghostly drips fall as their gradually echoed pings of sound bounce down different registers, their colors changing as they gradually fade. Heat Chief's third movement rises, dark and ugly-- all toms and guttural noise-- while the fourth and final is the complete opposite, morning light gradually filtering into a cave.

To say it plain, Heat Chief could've been brilliant-- it isn't on CD, or in headphones, or anywhere else its remarkably poor fidelity and mix are audible-- and on my half-broken, static-y stylus, comes pretty close.