Part of the beauty of structural minimalism in music has always been the allowance of focus on other elements such as lyrics, ambience, or, in the case of Columbus Ohio’s TASTY, the brute fucking force of sound, and the fact that it’s coming from two people. Their S/T cassette (out March 28 on Superdreamer records) is a barebones ripper with very few bones about it. There’s only one song that’s over two minutes long, and none of them go much past four chords and we like it that way. It forces a reckoning with a bass tone that’s so thickened with fuzz and gore, it’s as though a woodchipper is being used as an effects pedal. Without the two in front of you, it may as well be a blaring unison of a three-guitared band, the simplicity of chord progression letting you linger for a second on the ton of bricks being ground through your ears. Ian Graham’s vocals seem to waver between nasty punk snarls and some kind of rustic drawl, his voice trailing off at the end of some lines, in ways that would hint at the distant memory of a disgraced blues singer. A damn fun record.
