Artificial Go

Reviews

Artificial Go Musical Chairs LP

ARTIFICIAL GO returns with another offering of post-punk out of Cincinnati. On this go-around, you can easily hear the evolution in the band’s sound, with lush production and more genre exploration. The warm production sounds great, specifically allowing the bass lines to evoke the sounds of the SLITS, DELTA 5, or fellow Feel It Records act SPREAD JOY. The genre exploration, on the other hand, seems to provide really mixed results. The breezy Flying Nun Records sound in tunes like “The World is My Runway” and “Late to the Party” provide really nice, dreamy grooves that seem to lock in and get the head bopping. When the no wave influence gets too hot though, things start to veer the other way. Tracks like closer “Sky Burial” just feel ephemeral, and low point “Red Convertible” tried my patience to the point of fighting not to just skip forward and end it. Argue that I simply don’t get it, that’s fine, but the highs and lows on this record are so discordant that it takes the head from bopping along to banging on a table and back in whiplash-like fashion.

Artificial Go Hopscotch Fever LP

They apparently only started the project at the beginning of this year, but Cincinnati’s ARTIFICIAL GO cut right to the chase with their debut LP (and debut, period) Hopscotch Fever. An incessant wiggle of sparse and trebly guitar, solidly skeletal drumming, and mannered, alternately animated/nonplussed faux-Brit-accented vocals are roughed-up in a charmingly lo-fi and ramshackle recording, placing yet another daisy in the chain connecting today’s Midwestern post-punk weirdos to both the art school new wave eccentricity of SUBURBAN LAWNS and the scratchy naivety of late ’70s/early ’80s Rough Trade—the sort of band that would perform on rollerskates while decked out in loud, upcycled vintage outfits neo-New Wave Theatre-style, as they do in the video for “Pay Phone.” The taut, rhythmic herky-jerk of “Artificial Go” and the spacious brokedown disco groove snaking through “On Off” cast ARTIFICIAL GO as the less rambunctious kid siblings to their Feel It fam SPREAD JOY, as “Walk Like a Dog” and “Feeling Foxy” unwind into an ultra-minimalist, lopsided jangle like a modern BONA DISH, with Angie Willcutt’s too-cool vocal indifference buttoning everything up just so. Can’t really blame them for skipping any demo/single introduction formalities when they had this up their sleeves.