Outsider is a very apropos name for a power-pop/garage punk record of the caliber that Bermuda Squares have fired off here. This kind of rough and ragged, sensible acerbic style of vicious guitar pop, in my experience, attracts a lot of people who feel like they are just sliding around in orbit around the rest of humanity, like some satellite of sanity circling the sucking black hole that is the whole homosapien situation. Maybe they're justified in their misanthropy, or maybe they are as diluted as the masses they scorn, but what's consistently true is that they've got a feeling like something's just not right about the historic hiccup that is contemporary so-called civilization. I can say all this because I was that dude once upon a time, that dude who would plug in anything Mark Ryan or Jeff Beck would toss off just to drown out the absurdity of my surroundings, and as that guy, I can say that Bermuda Squares really gets the vibe right on this debut. Mean, slicing riffs that carve and fizzle the air around you like a Pollock painted with a man's own sweat, tears, and angst. Busy, bone-dry riffs that skim the dunes of distorted waves, like desert surf barrons, kicking up enough dirt to block out the sun so that they can rule the dustbowl like vampire kings. It bursts like a radioactive AV transmission from a crashing UFO shot in bichromatic 3D that vaporizes the homecoming queen when it accidentally misses a jump between radio towers and ends up pipping through the brackets of her braces. A connived, aural mugging that sandwiches you between rough layers of harmonies on each track to make sure you're held good and tight for the knockout of each and every hook. We live in a very stupid world, but the farther you go from the blast radius that Bermuda Squares emits, the dumber it's bound to seem. Why be a stranger when you could be an Outsider instead.
