Hey everybody! We’ve decided to branch out a little bit here on the Compass website by starting a weekly album/tape/song/whatever review series. We hope to have at least one or two reviews here each week, to give you out there some sense of what to expect from all the great (and, logically, the not-yet-great) tapes/records/CDs/CD-Rs out there.

So now, check that shit out:

DON GERO – DYNAMITE IN THE BRAIN

This new 5-song, 15-minute EP from Don Gero, a side project of Arvid Noes’ Zach D’Agostino is one of those rare records that seems to excite the chilled-out/dream and aggressive/noise-rock synapses simultaneously. In many other projects, this could lend itself to messy, overly-packed, let’s-see-how-many-sounds-we-can-fit-into-this-EP pomposity, but Dynamite In The Brain succeeds in making these two seemingly contradictory elements cohere seamlessly by never leaning too heavily on melody/structure to forget to add in some weird, pay-attention-or-you’ll-miss-’em noisy moments, but also never leaning too heavily on the noisy end of the spectrum to remember to drop in a quick bit of melody here and there (hell, the 4th track “04 – i” even resembles something that could be considered a pop song under the right circumstances). To use some easily identifiable signifiers, it recalls modern Animal Collective releases at times in it’s psych-poppiest moments, but never veers to far from what seems to be its Battles-esque math-rocky core. On the Christgau grading scale, this gets an A-. On the Pitchfork 1-10 scale, it gets 8.6. But fuck scales, we prefer tails.. as in WEIRD GROWTH.