New Machines: Buy Sell Trade – Album Review

New Machine

Buy Sell Trade (Aldora Britain) DL

Out now

Career retrospective of Ohio-based jazz/post-punk band.

Buy Sell Trade is a career-spanning retrospective from Ohio-based New Machines. Originally starting out as a solo project by band leader Eric Bair in 1999, recording New Machines that year with just Sam Krell adding saxophone, the project then expanded to become a full band, with Bair the main songwriter. This compilation brings together tracks from their three albums: 1999’s eponymous debut, 2002’s 729 Tecumseh and 2005’s Welcome To Metropolis.

Essentially, New Machines are a post-punk outfit with jazz-tinged elements. It’s college-rock with hints of Talking Heads and moments of Television. It’s that jazzy influence and sax that lifts the band above the normal post-punk outfit. Opening track Metropolis sets the scene well, with its edgy, stranger in a new city mood, but with an added sense of hope and expectation, rather than dread. New Machines are a mix of outsider angst, with a fine eye for the weird details of life, but with a natural optimism and wonder at the world.

Tracks culled from their first release in 1999 have a lo-fi sound. The rough around the edges I Love My Machine has a guitar sound set to phaser, whilst Mr Indecision sounds like a lost David Byrne track with its tension and paranoia, and Anesthetize Me could be a Ringo Starr Beatles track, submerged as it is in quirky country/blues. Though taken from this debut release, The Silence In Your Plan is a mature piece of writing from Bair, about the end of a relationship, creating a beautiful and melancholic vignette of a moment in time.

2002’s Eyeballs of the World is jerky with Talking Heads and Television riffs and a sax blowing like a manic insect buzzing away behind the edgy vocals. Likewise, Stupid Eyes has an Afrobeat through a post-punk distiller. Shielded shows a different side to the band, with an evocative guitar-led atmosphere.

Tracks from 2005 continue the post-punk with jazz-influenced sound. The whacked-out funky beat of Outta My Skin and Get Inside Me, a Richard Hell chugging beat and juddering sax, are two standouts, and a deeply weird Little Girl Head, which for some reason conjured up images of the Muppets band.

The retrospective is brought up to date with 2020’s single Fight Party/You’re in Atlanta, which we reviewed here.

All in all a great introduction to a band that carved their own space in the college rock, post-punk sounding world. Definitely worth checking out.

You can find New Machines online here, on Twitter and on Facebook.

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All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Twitter, Instagram and WordPress

Source: louderthanwar.com