Sometimes, I treat music too abstractly. Sometimes, when I aim to draw larger conclusions about what-it-all-means-man, I lose myself and limit the music. This perspective can neuter the direct impact of what I hear, as I listen behind songs, looking for pattern and symbol and other bullshit. This perspective can also homogenize, as explanations and analysis inevitably derive from pre-conceived points of reference and suddenly there is nothing new under the sun.

Wet Brain from Strict Agnostics is the warm knife sliding through the butter of this conceptual handicap. Its dirty, parallel playing, mic-clipping immediacy is an affront to musical “Analysis Paralysis”. The energy and honesty of the performance elicit a physical response; I am washed in the fuzz of the amps. Even Augustine got a semi from those Ambrosian hymns.

The songs playfully sneer at any attempt to read too much into the songs, at those who would “Huff My Smoke” as those who see the Virgin Mary in “Bob Dylan’s Used Condom”. But they also sneer at social identity concepts, at those who are absolutely noncommittal and at those who puff up aggression and “Wanna Be a Sociopath”. So, just as the Calvinists’ stark humility was just as aesthetically obsessed as Rococo Catholicism, Strict Agnostics’ attack on anemic analysis has an interpretive message?

Fuck, I’m doing it again. Time to put the record back on and be absolved. See these guys Thursday 9/26 at Radio Up and respond to what’s right in front of you, ears ringing and brains liquified.