Tunes Consumed: the Poutine Silver Platter

Common to whole music journalism thing is this tendency for historical throwback references. Marrying one band’s sound to another in a yadda-yadda meta-matchmaking of sounds is kind of our thing, but we don’t always stick to that.

After relating The Most Serene Republic to calculus I thought I’d be done with the mathematizing of music for a while, but almost prophetically a new release made its way to my mailbox by the name of Supersymmetry. To be brief, because even the wiki article on the subject will just be a confabbled mess of physics jargon to most people, supersymmetry was a branch to physics bourne out of the field of quantum theory. It gives us an anchor with which we can wrap our heads around multiple dimensions, and in the simplest sense allows for the possibility of multiple possibilities. It is X·Y = -Y·X. Easy, right?

My initial line of inquiry on listening to this Underwater Getdown album is on trying to decide why they would use this title: is it some physical characteristic of their sound and style? Undoubtedly they are quite liberal with giving the music a number of different spatial qualities: drums with echoes, vocal harmonies, and a general sense of fog looms over the album often quietening the main narrative in order of best fit, and darkening it as though it were illuminated by a damp street light on a moonless night.

It’s interesting to discover which parts of particular songs are highlighted with a punchy, crisp production. A song like “Monrovia” is wrought with the same sound and romantic lyricisim that made Bishop Allen famous. This song, while novel and even full of some of the same emotional urgency you might expect of Bright Eyes, it still says nothing for this Supersymmetry.

Moving on (backwards, even) past a few tracks like “Power Grid” and “Awake At Attention” - forgettable ones as the band dips into salty and unsavoury waters, we move onto their single. This is the track that lured me into the whole thing. A stargazing song, spatial and swooning the instrumentals are fantastic, and the lyrics the X on our map.

“Slingshot” is the song that makes the album name swell up with meaning and is what we’ve been digging at all along. It is whole world of simultaneity as the narrator wakes to find himself someone else. A Freaky-Friday swap this is not, and a roundabout lecture in physics it is far from. It is, on the otherhand entirely: a bleeding-heart tale of woe, one in which the band ironically finds its strengths and comes across as a musical blend of malady. Instrumentally it sounds like a blend of Arcade Fire and Radiohead - sans lyrical grandiosity and obscure accent, respectively. Being simple as the songs are is far from a criticism of the band, and after giving the album a thorough going-over it’s a relief to find that it’s not shockingly geeky or post-modern physics babble of metaphors.

subatomically split (and then listen):
Underwater Getdown - Slingshot
Underwater Getdown - Monrovia
Underwater Getdown - Patterns

Underwater Getdown are as of yet a wholly untapped talent from the southern state of Arizona, doing their own thing and selling physical copies of the album from their own site. $10 via paypal and you can get Supersymmetry to your door, with the sweet serenity of knowing that your pennies will probably go toward paying for another of their picturesque holidays.