Free the Music is a guide to new albums, EPs and songs that are available for free online. Today’s drop is: Caddywhompus – Remainder.
At any one moment in indie music history, there are a number of divergent sounds heating up the national scene. They’ve got their communities, they’ve got their fans and they may or may not sound like the most important form of music ever. But these genres hardly seem to cross. The same can be said of today’s splintering indieverse: When you have genres with names like glo-fi and dubstep – sounds that are as different in aural state as they are in descriptive code – it sure is hard to see and hear much overlap without turning into a veritable Girl Talk.
And then there’s Caddywhompus. Although the duo isn’t combining glo-fi and dubstep, their spin on the noise-infected, lo-fi garage sound that’s taken indie (or Pitchfork) by storm in recent years is a veritable expansion on a genre that best displays marks of simplicity. Sure, No Age give a good experimental spin on said lo-fi anthems, but the tunes that fill Remainder make Caddywhompus sound like Animal Collective next to the L.A. noise-punks.
Whether they’re juggling a pop-friendly melody and razor-sharp guitar riffs on “Golden,” fusing electronic-spliced feedback with a solid breakbeat on “Let The Water Hit The Floor,” or carving big anthems out of childlike-sounds on “Big Fun,” Caddywhompus show a remarkable amount of musical flexibility in just eight songs. Sure, it’s noisepop, but even the slight reference to noise makes the band’s pop-power seem diminished ever so slightly.
With all the pop-panache bursting within Remainder, it’s remarkable how a band like Caddywhompus remains relatively unknown. Remainder has the power to change the band’s anonymity. Here’s hoping others catch on to this brilliant album and band.
You can download Remainder from Community Records.
Caddywhompus – “Congo Half-Mask”
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