Album Review: Fake Surfers by The Intelligence

It'd be stupid to call your band the Intelligence without showing signs of progress and evolution. And over the course of four albums, the now full-time project of ex-A Frames drummer Lars Finberg has loosened up its formative post-punk pessimism to the point that the band's chosen MySpace URL-- www. myspace.

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Imitation surfing seems as improbable a concept as an Intelligence album that isn't entirely encrusted in distortion and static, but that's exactly what Fake Surfers offers. While Lars Finberg's music became incrementally less noisy on earlier Intelligence albums, this set of songs takes a big step in that direction -- which comes as something of a shock, given how easily Deuteronomy balanced the Intelligence's abrasive sonics and weird tales with clean(er) production, and how popular similarly noisy bands like No Age and In the Red labelmates the Blank Dogs became in the late 2000s. Of course, saturated sounds are still a key part of the Intelligence's music: "Tower" cloaks clever wordplay in ultra-distorted drums, and "Saint Bartolomeu"'s dual vocals and data-panicking synths hark back to Brainiac's glory days.

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The Intelligence has been the outlet of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lars Finberg (formerly of the A-Frames) for a number of years now, one in which he’s gradually traced a path away from the A-Frames highly conceptualized dread into a rock-based form of malaise all his own. With the help of a constantly rotating lineup, the band has cranked out a surprising number of singles and albums thus far, each one further refining what’s become a singular approach to post-punk and garage rock in an arena that’s been so overstuffed it’s almost impossible to stand. Now, having developed his style almost to the point of formula, Finberg presents two new Intelligence discs that introduce new ripples in the band’s output.

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