Pitchfork

Aa is pronounced "Big A Little a." There's something worth noticing there: You see the signs representing a vowel sound, but you don't say "ahhh." Instead, this Brooklyn band decides how you should pronounce its name, and it upsets your expectations in the process. You feel the same displacement when listening to GAame (no pronunciation key given), Aa's debut LP. The band employs its own secret language across the record's 13 tracks, and because the group doesn't give the listener a key, its grunts, howls, and cries become part of the rhythm of GAame, an album where rhythm is privileged above all.

Of course this remapping brings up comparisons to other rhythm-is-all, language-is-secondary bands, such as Animal Collective, Liars and OOIOO. While there is something (little-a) animal about Aa, GAame doesn't have the same sweaty, visceral propulsion of AC's Feels or the wildman roar of Liars. Instead the album is insect-like, full of seemingly chaotic rhythms that are, on closer inspection, guided by complex systems.

Think of GAame as a container for different suites, each guided by their own pacing and palette of sounds. These tracks also bleed into one another-- a feature that the iPod ruins. Opener "Deathmask" is GAame's overture, a 30-second sampling that begins with the same eerie tension that ends the whole record. On "Time In", that palette is wet fingers on glass, flicking cicada wings, vespine drums that keep low to the soil. "Best of Seven" speaks in strident ringing school and sleigh bells. For "New Machine" and "Thirteen", Aa use synths as rhythm-- in the former they approximate chirps and chortles; they rise and fall like gentle respiration in the latter. "Manshake" shows the band at their best: Not just noise, not just drums, but something that reaches ecstatic, bombastic heights.

Since GAame works as a suite, it also suffers from being a little too cohesive. Sometimes Aa draw the connections between songs too strongly, which means the record can drag toward its end, when the listener has long been ready to drop the repetition and move on. And sometimes the vocalizations are all wrong. Take the shouted opening to "Time In", in which the vocalist shouts out a list of puns, including, "You've got GAame." Its micro-rhythms and elephantine horns would have been better off alone.

The vocal doesn't work because cliché doesn't suit Aa's intentions. GAame wants to function the same way the band's name does-- as a way to control your attention by forcing the unfamiliar. So the sounds we're used to hearing disrupt an otherwise strange experience. Move into the familiar and the structure collapses.