The Procedure Club

Finally got around to listening to The Procedure Club's It's Only Fair cassette, which is basically an appetizer consisting of three tracks from their most recent album Music For The Leisure Time, a favorite from their self-titled, and four new ones. The new ones are kinda meh, sounding a little like the kludge-formed interludes that the Swirlies used to do. But The Procedure Club even at their sloppiest have Andrea's eerie vocals holding the most ridiculous finger pounded drum machine beat together.

By the way, special mention must be made about It's Only Fair's packaging, since the cassette's plastic j-card looks and feels like a petrified Fruit Roll-Up.

On all their releases, Andrea sounds like a ghost at the bottom of an ancient well, luring children to its edge to try and fool them into diving in. She bounces from one hard panned ear to the other, with delay and reverb galore making her mumbled crooning a haunt filled fog. Adam's noise-wash comes straight from Black Tambourine, Ecstasy & Wine-era My Bloody Valentine, and early Jesus and Mary Chain, which is totally underused nowadays. Adam's bass and guitar chug along with the same spastic energy of his Groovski days, and all the glitches and warts of home recording get their moment in the sun, but almost never do his pop sensibilities go forgotten.

To his credit, Adam never goes completely over the top with the corrupting magic of lo-fi recording. If Alvin Lucier's 1969 experiment I Am Sitting in a Room established the spectrum of what can happen to sound the more you fuck with it, then Adam's recordings are still comfortably close to the middle. Which is fine. There's no need to utterly pulverize things like Times New Viking often do to achieve the right textures.

The Procedure Club has opened some of Connecticut's greatest underground shows, such as Ariel Pink back in 2008, Doomstar! in 2009, and most recently the final Shaki Presents show at BAR, opening for Gary War. Along with the Unexplainable Recordings release of It's Only Fair, The Procedure Club have a release on the singles-based digital label Beko. Their self-titled is available from the Mexican net-lable Scribble Kite, and the Series Two Records CD-R of Music For The Leisure Time can be ordered from Insound. Oh yeah, and what's this business with The Procedure Club signing with Captured Tracks? I guess someone at Captured Tracks has the same terrible taste in music as myself.

You can catch The Procedure Club next with The Beets, Christmas Island and Beach Fossils on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at Cafe Nine (cost $6.00 - 8:00PM - 21+).


Download The Procedure Club's self-titled free here: CLICK

Download The Procedure Club's Beko release free here: CLICK

The Procedure Club's "It's Only Fair" is available from Unexplainable Recordings on cassette or CDR for $6.00 PPD, $10.00 PPD World.

The Series Two Records CD-R of Music For The Leisure Time can be ordered from Insound here: CLICK