Marbled Eye

Reviews

Marbled Eye Forever 12″

The best post-punk creates the best tension; an uneasiness the listener can feel pulse through their appendages. Modern bands like DIӒT and INSTITUTE are perfect examples. MARBLED EYE, having formed a couple years after their aforementioned peers, feel like they’re chasing those tigers but never quite catching up. Their latest offering provides some of said tension, but there’s a layer of detachment seeping through which feels more affect than effect. That’s not to say these songs do not have merit. In a dark, cool room, these songs blasting from the speakers would surely create an atmosphere, but again that may be the rub here—the intent to curate sensation rather than a sensation naturally developing. Or maybe I’m the rub, the rube. What causes more friction to your ears, pageantry or pedantry? Turn this one on and decide for yourself.

Marbled Eye Read the Air LP

On the distant heels of 2018’s Leisure LP, Oakland’s MARBLED EYE is out with their second LP Read the Air. Vocalist and guitarist Chris Natividad also leads the band’s stranger, moodier cousin in the solo project PUBLIC INTEREST (I reviewed Spiritual Pollution last year, and it took me a minute to remember this connection). With the departure of MARBLED EYE’s original bassist (who also had the studio space and did their production) and the pandemic isolating the band, it’s no wonder this next album took some time, but it is surely worth the wait. Inside we find ten songs of vocal-droning post-punk pleasure, complete with guitars that wander in and out of each other’s riffs without sounding crowded, and disrupter bass and drums that rest and then pummel their way back to the main rhythm. These guys just went on a crazy Midwest and East Coast fall tour, hitting thirteen cities in thirteen days. Wow. Read the Air: not to be missed.