Quasi’s first album for Sub Pop Records, which puts another very impressive band under contract. “Breaking the balls of history” is a record that shows the duo at its best, with all the psychedelic charge and impetuosity that at certain moments becomes almost stinging, dragging several of the listener’s neurons along with it.
Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss over the years, by now this is their tenth record together, have become one, an amplifier of something from another dimension that marries the purest and heaviest psychedelia with an alternative pop that gives the songs a minimum of melody, and what a melody. The course of their music is totally delirious, there is no under or over, everything fluctuates, the distortions are the mainstays of the whole, there are moments that could be categorised as indie but are so different from the common canon of that music that the comparison cannot be made.
It is not all distorted or seen through a kaleidoscope, but even in the most intimate and personal moments there is such a marked aura of diversity that it becomes the hallmark. And despite what has been said so far, Quasi’s music is sweet and reassuring, like being inside a warm whale belly, which you know is as dangerous as it is attractive.
The duo’s songs are not common or codified compositions, but rather special moments, each one different from the next, keeping Sam’s voice steady, which is hallucinated and sweet at the same time.
The album as a whole is not easy to understand if one expects canonical, easy and even a little pleasurable indie songs as in so many other cases, but it is wonderful if one dives into it, discovering the physicality that goes hand in hand with its ethereal and sulphurous being, a different look at the world, another way of reading it all an acid hymn to sweetness and beauty.
A complex work with many readings, it goes beyond canonical music to search inside the listener for something important in a cathartic manner, which would be the aim of the best and most orthodox psychedelia. A multiform and shape-shifting work, another great episode in a career with an absolutely different and different stylistic signature.
Quasi – Breaking the balls of history
TRACKS
Last Long Laugh
Back in Your Tree
Queen of Ears
Gravity
Shitty Is Pretty
Riots & Jokes
Breaking the Balls of History
Doomscrollers
Inbetweenness
Nowheresville
Rotten Wrockv
The Losers Win
