Aluminum is kind of a heavy metal, isn't it? And I don't mean in terms of its actual weight as compared to other materials, and I'm certainly not implying a connection to any variety of extreme alternative music. What I mean is that aluminum is an industrial product that is laden with meaning despite its ubiquity (or maybe because of it). It's a flexible material, with a fair amount of versatility in its application in industry and the arts alike, and while it bends easily, it's also very considered quite dependable... if disposable due to its cheapness and availability. Sounds sort of familiar? What does this also sound like? If you said your average shlub, working a job and trying to have a life on the side, then we're on the same wavelength. Like most other things fed into the machine of this society, in order to be worthy of such a fate, one has to be not only shiny, dependable, flexible, and also, ultimately, easy to discard. The long, glossy garbage chute of contemporary life is the backdrop of San Francisco band Aluminum's debut LP, Fully Beat- an endeavor that translates the symbolic potential of man as raw material for commodification and exploitation into a focused statement of rhythm-captured lament. It's not so surprising, then, that the group's sound on this record is heavily reminiscent of the sonic escapism of a famously industrial and de-personalized landscape, that of 1980s Manchester, England. Tracks like the dazed, slow-motion dash, new-wave, jangle-hop pounce, and Remain in Light inspired percussion of "Beat" overlay to evince a brightly anguished puckering rhythmic bliss, through which the soul may sink farther with every striving grasp for daybreak. The carbonated boil of "Always Here, Never There" rebounds on downy waves of bittersweet synth buckles, tethering resignedly melancholic vocal tresses to a tugging lure which pulls it through a quicksand bass groove in a befuddlingly blue depiction of one's experience of life as a telescoping series of empty frames. Both "Haha" and "Pulp" make some of the more direct callbacks to the sophisticated sadness of acts that characterized the British underground many decades past, with the former resembling a pensive clasping of Happy Monday grooves to Cocteau Twins's lost, daydreaming ambiance, while the latter is a wailing wall of kicking, shoegazing, hot-foot maneuvers, which fizzles like someone lit a Slowdive track like a fuse and let it burn into an angry, bubbling puree- a blood-tinted valentine to the reality that no matter where you attempt to hide, your failures will always hunt you down. Then there is the sharp and slinky, dark and sticky, candy-flavored-tar-pull of "Behind My Mouth," which is towed along by a tenacious, plaintively and coercive beat in the company of a tyrannically groovy rhythm, creating a constantly shifting stage upon which a lightly chewy melody chides, "Do you ever see behind my mouth?," an ominously innocuous phrase that feels like the utterance of one of the inhabitants of the Red Room in Twin Peaks, an eerie summons prompting you to find the true orator of who conveyed some key piece of information, an entity hidden behind the teeth of the one who presumably spoke. Fully Beat is a shiny, brightly bemusing ode to the trash that even the best of us are slowly fashioned into with time and pressure.
