The New Sound of Numbers "Minimal Animal"

There’s a friction here, between what this song seems to be striving toward, and how it actually ends up presenting itself. It’s aiming to mimic the chilly distance between (female) performer and performance that was achieved so perfectly twenty years ago by Kleenex/Lilliput, Delta 5, the Raincoats, and Siouxsie Sioux, and ten years before them by Nico. It’s an endlessly attractive style; one that manages to exude sexuality without being even remotely sexual, or achieve coldness by exuding warmth (or the other way around maybe). It’s a political move, and one that I never tire of. But the way “Minimal Animal” (mp3) actually ends up sounding is another story, I think. The New Sound of Numbers is from Athens, Georgia, and count among their members some refugees from Elephant Six also-rans Circulatory System, and I won’t go any further with the rural psychedelic genealogy down there, lest my eyes move closer together. What the connection highlights, though, is the song’s root in the same sort of backporch chemistry-set aesthetic that I might have just conjured from memories, but is how I remember the CS album, which I like very much by the way. And the languid violin threading throughout the song contrasts in all kinds of appealing ways with the William Gibson-meets Wire detached-romanticism of the lyrics: “the velvet animal/the fat chains harmonize/what force is muting the sudden appearance/of words and thoughts.” It’s what Greil Marcus (buy) would perhaps refer to as “a voice that through worry, sarcasm, irony, panic, or humor is manifestly trying to figure things out. It’s a distanced voice, antinaturalistic, almost never direct—the voice of an observer or of one observing oneself. Most strikingly, it is an anonymous voice.”

Liberty Seeds comes out October 10 on Cloud Recordings. The New Sound of Numbers’ Myspace. Their website.