I'm writing this review entirely sober (unless you're like a Mormon or something and have hang-ups about caffeine). It's not a usual state for me to be composing in. I generally confine my drunkenness/ inebriatedness/baka-bacchanalness to the weekends. Which is why I'm listening to music nearly as often as my schedule allows. For me (and presumably others, presumably you), when a song hits right, it's better than a drug- it's an entirely distinct level of euphoria. New Jersey's High. certainly is helping me stay hitched to the dragon's tail at the moment with their EP Come Back Down. A series of highs that will keep you low and lows that drag you down a drainage vent, like you foolishly accepted a solicitation from a sewer-dwelling clown, who, rather than eat you, wants to sequester you and interrogate you for your impressions on where his life went wrong. As if they've been struck by a vengeful clap of lightning, the internal temperature of High.'s calamity-chasing, Vans voyeurism is like that of a cracked pressure cooker- boiling with an irrepressible yearning and an unrequited expectancy that builds and surges on each track in a fated eruption of kitchen decor, obliterating catharsis. Through the cracks in the wall carved by the swelling distension of their distortive feedback-blossoms and the raking lacerate of the reverb extending from the dusky spindle of their grooves, you can almost glimpse the golden preserve of untarnished tenderness which vocalist Christian Castan is attempting to reach with the misty keen and the chest-emptying sigh of his lament. Come Back Down will bury you in heavy moods while delivering the type of high that you'll need an excavator to free yourself from- if that's even what you desire...
