Mount Zero - Swapmeet
Fuzzy, glitchy, shimmering songs that explode
The four members of Swapmeet recorded their debut album Mount Zero in a beach house about half an hour’s drive away from their native Adelaide – living together for two weeks, trading instruments and production duties, and taking breaks to stare out into the ocean. This sequestered approach enabled the intricacy of the album’s sound, as the band gradually built up songs with hundreds of layered tracks.
As they describe it, the writing & recording processes were deeply interwoven: songs were constructed in a live band context, then processed, fragmented and jumbled up inside computer production software; before being brought back to the band and ‘re-learnt’. I think the biggest triumph of the album is that it translates this approach into something unusual but totally coherent: it feels fully realised as both indie rock livewire and bright, glitchy indietronica.
Mount Zero’ s production style gripped me initially – its rich texture, cacophonous fuzz, and quirky sound effects, but none of this would work if the songs were rubbish. Fortunately, the songs are very good. The band have a knack for melodies which are sometimes classic & timeless, and other times properly weird and surprising. Take the guitar riff in ‘Seeds’, it starts in a rousing, hopeful mode then turns abruptly halfway through to become dark and menacing, like something from Slint’s Spiderland. Elsewhere, on ‘Bonny’, the band create a slight dissonance between the harmony of verse and chorus - giving the song a jolting, patchwork quality. Each time it arrives, the movement from the verse into the chorus feels like a flash-cut.
Lyrically, the album deals with the passions, heartbreaks and general existential messiness of early adulthood. In many of the songs there seems to be a stark opposition drawn between intense, hyperactive emotional states and a sense of inertia or incapacity to act upon them.
I wanna cry, I’m gonna break
I think I’ll tear apart
If I keep hurting
It keeps on hurting
Forever to go and nothing to say
And all that I fear arrives
And I do nothing
I am nothing
(‘My Heart Breaks II’)
Across the album, you can hear this battle between passion and passivity played out by the music: sweet songs are ripped apart by noise and feedback without warning, or otherwise unsettled by harshness & discordance lingering just below the surface. Something about this duality feels true at least to my experience of being in my early 20s. A lot of those strong, irrational feelings are carried over from adolescence, but it feels like there’s more pressure to present stability and level-headedness. Lots of feeling and chaos that you just sort of absorb, or allow to run in the background. But then of course there’s plenty of sweetness and adventure also, it’s all as jumbled up as Swapmeet present it on Mount Zero.
My favourite of the album’s 5 singles was ‘Sand’ - and it probably holds up as my favourite song on the record: it’s hazy, sweet and romantic, stacked with gorgeous melodies across its spread of guitars, voices and pianos. At other points on Mount Zero, Swapmeet deploy wall-of-fuzz guitar eruptions as surprise attacks, but on ‘Sand’ the fuzz rises and falls more gently, subtly shifting as the song cruises along. I also LOVE the plinky-plonk percussion, and the little booom! sound effect which hits after the words ‘minefield explosion’.
If there’s a slight sense heading towards the end of the album that the band have zoned in on a certain formula, then it’s offset by the brilliant and strange closer ‘My Heart Breaks II’. The song is a bit folky, noticeably darker and with more happening in the low end than the rest of the record. It’s restrained and sparse, until the pace shifts and the song lets loose… sick drums really going for it! one last big fuzzy swell, and then a tender outro which rounds off the album.
Mount Zero pairs nicely with Feeble Little Horse’s Bitknot from a couple months ago – both albums are fuzzzzzy, sweet in places, noisy in others, and indebted to ‘90s analogue sounds while embracing glitchy, maximalist digital production. Water From Your Eyes It’s a Beautiful Place from last year also sits in a similar world. Maybe this kind of glitchy, fuzzy sound is a bit of an emerging subgenre or tendency in contemporary indie rock? To me it feels like something different, and more progressive, than the broader wave of 90s alt-rock influenced indie which has been in ascendance for quite a while now.
In any case this is a great album and well worth your time. I also heard from some friends who were at SXSW this year that Swapmeet were really good live – they’re briefly touring the UK in November, playing Pitchfork London as well as some shows in Brighton, Manchester and Glasgow, go on downnnnn if you can!
for now, listen to this album, let me know what you think, be well, be sweet, love you lots bye.
david