Totally Bitchin!
Pick up the latest issue of Bitch magazine and check out Jim Burlingame's review of The Purple Rhino Squad versus The Blue Whale Super Heavy Assault Troops!
Or just keep reading, cause we totally posted it below.
Excerpt from Bitch Magazine:
'With a name that demands you grab a dictionary and an album that sounds like a Mad Libs fragment, Portland, Oregon's The Angry Orts shape your first impression with a feint, a false expectation of liberal-arts playfulness. And then they disabuse you of this notion with the scorching, Sleater-Kinney-esque "Avoiding My Eyes". Indeed, the band has an uncanny ability to cobble together disparate but familiar sounds into a seamless whole. It's a group effort, finding the door out of a house of pigeonholes, but the key that opens it is singer Sara Hernandez's chameleonlike voice.
Sure, on their full-length debut, bassist James Puryear and drummer Matthew Hernandez comport themselves admirably, thumping out the rhythm on Blink-182-style numbers and keeping it subtle on quiet ones, and guitarist Aaron Ettlin switches nimbly between Jack-White-flavored freakouts and slowcore atmospherics. But the way Hernandez channels Concrete Blonde's Johnette Napolitano on one song ("Granville Island") and Belle and Sebastian-era Isobel Campbell on the next ("Vyvyan"), wielding a panoply of deja ecoute weapons, is simply astounding.
Lyrically, The Angry Orts do hew close to the double-yellow cliche/redundancy line ("The leaves are changing again/So I will be leaving my friend" is followed, two tracks later, by the title "Leaving"), but you hardly notice details like these when the sounds they concoct elsewhere are so mesmerizing.
- Jim Burlingame
LISTEN TO WHEN: You're feeling both nostalgic and cutting edge.'
Shout out to Mr. Burlingame for the review - hopefully we'll have another album to send your way soon!
