Abstract and knowingly disoriented, Green/Blue's Paper Thin, is like wadding through a desert mirage. The heat of the overdriven guitars ripples above you, breaking up the sunbeams into vicious microwaves, cooking the air in your surroundings while the trenchant grooves unfailingly pull you to some unseen center of gravity, your feet splashing through sand as it rises around your shins like the receptive wake of a vernal pool. The unperturbed pulse of Jim Blaha and Annie Sparrows's spooling vocals, combine like the winds of the East and West at the crossroads of your burnt and exhausted body as it lies like a fallen weather vain, circling you in an incorporeal maypole dance, mockingly celebrating the manner by which the ridge of your skull still protrudes from the sand, like a mother's pregnant stomach breaching the waters of a birthing pool, a perverse reversal of your genesis as you are gradually reclaimed by the Earth. Yet, you do not know peace in this unmarked tomb. The cutting, circular passage of "Last One" tills the ground above you in a motion that is half field hand and half grave robber, a skeletal grip guiding its efforts, as it grazes and knicks your exposed flesh. After such exposures, songs like "Floating Eye" come at some relief, where a waterlogged bass places its full weight against you until you are forced back and gently submerged in a sinking well of insentience and lulled in a deep swoon by a simple and softly psychedelic chorus. From this sunken place, you are optimally positioned to appreciate the stormy, surface clap of "Moving On," where the combination of wavy, jangle chords and harsh percussive patter create the sensation of reclining under a car's windshield as it is battered by rain, and "In Time," where sharp, trembling guitar lines and splintering feedback create an infinite, reflective illusion of a carnival hall that you always seem to be running through without ever reaching a point of egress. Paper Thin is named such, not from a dearth of substance, but rather how easily that substance can be pierced to find yourself on the other side of a new reality.
