Album Review: Sorcerer by Tonstartssbandht

With the arrival of Sorcerer, Tonstartssbandht now have seventeen releases. It's a daunting amount of music even though brothers Andy and Edwin White have been upping entire albums to their Bandcamp page--which phonetically pronounces as "TAHN-starts-bandit"--since 2008 (not counting Andy's solo projects as Andy Boay and Edwin's as Eola). While Orlando-born and bred, for the better part of their existence the White boys lived in different cities, resorting to swapping their drum and Danelectro guitar parts back and forth online.

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The first full-length outing for Mexican Summer from Tonstartssbandht (pronounced tahn-starts-bandit), Sorcerer finds sibling guitar-and-drum duo Edwin and Andy White dishing out a hypnotic three-song set that harbors some secret depths. Clocking in at just under 35 minutes, Sorcerer's willfully lo-fi, exploratory jam session architecture is pretty digestible, which makes the occasional sonic detour much more rewarding. "Breath" lays down a largely one-note net of delay-heavy noodling and aptly breathy vocals, but its jazzy overtones and easy warmth feel welcoming.

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If we were to say - and we are - that brothers Andy and Edwin White bashed out this echoing, discordant noise rock cacophony in their Brooklyn apartment, grabbing at its accompanying soundtrack of siren wails and train clatter and folding them into the three tracks of elongated sonic disturbance of their first album since 2011's Now I Am Become, don't latch onto the "bashed out" bit as being critical. Instead, it reflects the dynamic way the Whites glue their angular sounds together, so that in each of these sequences there's the overt and the submerged - tensions that pull in myriad directions but which have the feel of immediacy, improvisation, throwing out shapes and seeing how they can be pulled into each other. Distorted, fuzzed-out light and shade.

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