Ears Wide Open: Fell Runner
Kevin Bronson on
3
Fell Runner do not make easy music. If you’re looking for synth-pop candy or overblown pop hooks, best click elsewhere. The L.A. quartet’s self-titled debut album, just out on Orenda Records, is a wicked thicket of prickly guitars, asymmetrical rhythms and raw, emotive vocals: Post-punk meets world music meets math rock, if you will. What’s remarkable is that the foursome went his direction to “blow off steam” from their studies in jazz and West African music at Cal Arts. Hey, they could have knocked out some ballads. But not singer-guitarists Steven van Betten and Gregory Uhlmann, bassist Patrick Kelly and drummer Tim Carr (all current or former members of HAIM, the Americans, and Harriet). Says Uhlmann: “We’d been both playing a lot of jazz and introspective kinds of music and felt like we needed an outlet for a more raw form of expression.” “Song of the Sun” and “Rain Room” are good entrées; “Cobwebs” is the odd bird on the album, with its production quality; and on the opposite tip “Better Isn’t Always Better” is as unvarnished-sounding as it is the unvarnished truth.
||| Stream: “Fell Runner” in its entirety:
||| Live: Fell Runner celebrate their album release with a show Sunday night at the Bootleg Theater with Emerson Star and Easy.
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