Album review: Reebosound – This Is Reebosound

I started this review yesterday, but simply couldn’t finish it to my satisfaction. Twenty four hours later, listening through to This Is Reebosound for the fourth time, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it, really, beyond liking it for reasons I cannot account for in words. The older among you might understand if I say that Reebosound seem to be something like a Jesus Jones and EMF smoothie, unexpectedly spiked with Paige Hamilton’s stomp-box steroids, stored underground and then decanted twenty years later into Hanover, Germany. But there are Therapeutic? moments in there too, fragments of smashed pumpkins, lumps of junior dinosaurs and sonic youths… fuck it, there are even bits that remind me of Terrorvision and Feeder out drinking in Antwerp with dEUS. Yeah, I know.

The quicker way of saying the above would have been to say “This Is Reebosound sounds nineties-alt-rock as fuck, mush”, but that would be an oversimplification for this familiar yet idiosyncratic album, odd in its tonal and temporal roots. There are some weird squelchy studiosonics bits at the tip and roach ends of some of the tunes, and I’m pretty sure those are sequenced drums, too; this is not surprising, as Reebosound is technically just one Sven Missullis, though I’m told he’s gone and got a band in for touring purposes.

But it means we have a rare chance to hear songs born not of a maelstrom of creative differences between a handful of people, but sprung fully formed and Athena-like from a single Zeussian brow. And Missu’s brow clearly creases at a lot of the same things we used to wave our fringes around to during the slackertastic and whimsical early nineties; Pixies-style Debaserlines, ironically sixties organ patches (as per back when you could be ironic about being ironic without being cynical about the whole process), buzzy squelchy synths and chunky fuzz guitar, and slightly breathless and untrained vocals slouching around hands-in-pockets through the hinterlands between bitter pop sweetness and rawk attitude. Self-produced solo albums seem to me to allow a more transparent window on their creator than a band project, but usually we have a previous career with which to inform our reading of the artist’s character. In my ignorance, I’m left knowing little of note about Missullis, except that he’s got a rare knack for simple super-hooky grunge-pop songs.

You really have heard it all before… or at least I certainly have, but for some reason it works in Reebosound‘s favour this time out. Simply sounding a bit nineties isn’t enough to make me like a record (no matter how hard you may find that to believe), but Reebosound‘s songs are so sparse and simple (though very densely recorded, and mastered hideously loud that they almost defy analysis. I can’t point to anything in particular and say “there, that’s a particularly good bit”, but if you came in and asked me to turn it down so you could ask me a question, I’d almost certainly resent you for it. I might even pout a bit.

This Is Reebosound robs riffs and changes and ideas from far and wide. The hard sweep panning of the guitar and synth riffs in “Leave This City” is very disorientating, there’s a very poppy version of original New York no wave hiding under the Ride-esque twanging guitars of “Ghost Lights”, and “Mother Earth” begins like an unfortunate dabble with pop-punk… though thankfully it’s more early NOFX than late Green day, and the chorus-y latter half of it is the most gloriously obvious freakout four-chord-air-guitar singalong EVAR.

And “Bad Luck”… I mean, that’s just great. What a chorus! It’s a classic (hell, a hackneyed) chord sequence and melody combo, but there’s a reason they get used over and over again, and you can hear that in action. People say that Andrew WK has a knack for pop choruses, but in a bareknuckle fight between the two, I’d back ol’ Reebo here with my last dollar. This is loud, dumb and scuzzy guitar pop at its predictable best, and if liking it makes me a product of my generation, well, I can live with that. Maybe you should try it yourself.