Ape School's "Junior Violence" makes child's play out of disillusionment, conjures glee and menace out of machines, and speaks candidly, about damnation, elation, meat and dirty money. Bizarre pop songs created by a singular author, for a readership of one and everyone, all fit snugly into an accidental package. Got it pressed to wax and called it Junior Violence. The Hometapes label release, which they call "a death rattle of the most optimistic sort ... half-synthesized and half-howled ... " is both psychedelic and sobering, reverent, unabashedly, imaginative and savagely stubborn. Ape School's Michael Johnson wears his influences on his sleeve, washed through the twisted entrails of archaic synthesizers, cast up to a stratospheric future on the back of a wail, on a wave of Eventide. The album, streamed in its entirety here, brings craft out of early retirement, with sonic and thoughtful shapes, wrought smart and acerbic, like sugar and acrid, to say that it's still there to be heard.
"Junior Violence" is shared with Scion Sessions thanks to our good pals in the PNW at Hometapes, from whom you can purchase the LP right here:
http://home-tapes.com/Hometapes/HAUS_HT054.html
Ape School "Junior Violence"
LP / CD / DIG out 8/07/12 on Hometapes.
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