LADIES CHOICE RECORDS: Press

THE STRANGER SUGGESTS - Saturday Feb. 12th : METAL NIGHT
(Music)
Usually "ladies choice" refers to cornball drink specials at clubs where desperate owners attempt to court male patrons with free entrance for the females. Here, though, Ladies Choice is the name of a production company hosting two nights of solid local metal/hardcore at the Rendezvous. Friday features Playing Enemy, Free Verse, and Ambitious Career Woman, while tonight's show lines up Sugar Skulls, Pipsqueak, and Golgothan Sunrise - an instrumental avant metal act that also incorporate bits of ambient and math rock into their songs. )Rendezvous, 2322 Second Ave, 441-5823, 10:30, $6)

2005-08-16
My god. I’ll tell ya what. I’m not much of a grindcore guy, but this could turn a good boy bad. Sean is a two-piece consisting of a guy who plays drums and a guy who plays a keyboard; no singing, no quiet parts, just noisy, sweaty, angry sex racket. The drums are spastic, yet they hold a melody. The keys are fed through a noise pedal, then a guitar amp. Each of the only two assets of this band hold their own. You can listen for just the drums or you can listen for just the keys, either way your mouth will more than likely hang open as you try to put it all together.

There are eleven songs, each aptly titled and centered around cacophony and the pair’s absurd amount of talent. Everything is done with boundless speed and seamless accuracy. “Razor Burn or Herpes” tumbles and winds down to its wiry and clunking one-minute-and-thirteen-second halt, while “Gay Divorce” carries a more rigid, and fiery assembly of thick drums and straight-forward grating from the quick-fingered keyboardist, Luke Laplante. Mike Peterson takes care of the rhythm, a man who looks more like someone who’d pass out in your niece’s kiddie pool without any clothes on rather than put on what could be the best display of drumming I’ve heard this year. I kid only because with the quality and temper of this record, there isn’t room for much else.

Hearing this disc and seeing this band live are almost two completely different experiences, when you’ve got the disc going, everything seems to make a bit more sense, when their pounding away on stage, it’s almost maddening to try to see where they’re trying to go with what they’re doing. If you get the chance to witness one of their shows, get off your ass.

This one tops out at just over fifteen minutes, which contrary to what you might think, is more than plenty. An asshole would just write this off as noise, an elitist would call this key-driven spazz-metal, you could call it noise-rock, you could call it Chinese Jazz, I’ll just call it good and tell you that its worth your time.

- Philip Del Costello |
2005-08-16

MAXIMUM ROCK N ROLL #269 review
For a band not to get beat up with a name like that, you know they got to be the good kind of a "Boy Named Sue"-type thing. Even before seeing the picture of the burly and bearded dude behind drums,though,you know they got nothing to worry about cuz this bizarre two-piece riips in all the best ways.The real x-factor kicker about SEAN though-far more than the name(which gets explained on their website)--is that all sounds contained herein are made with just drums and keyboards, the most blown out,distorted,,noise-ridden keyboards ever. As the album title suggests,this is instrumental,schizophrenic, million-changes-a-minute,drain -bamaged,prog-grind insanity and a definite must for fans of LANA DAGALES,YETI,TARANTULA HAWK,ZOMBI,RUINS, and of course,YES.