It's fair to say that Dissapears have a fair bit in common with The Black Angels. Like The Black Angels' first two albums ('Directions to See a Ghost' in particular), Dissapears' sophomore effort announces its entrance with an immense swirling fog of reverb and tremolo. Indeed, the comparisons to The Black Angels don’t end there, as across the six tracks on 'Guider,' Disappears demonstrate a love of echo-drenched swampy psychedelic rock punctuated by crashing crescendos. As a fan of The Black Angels, I consider this to be A Good Thing. However, where Disappears depart from The Black Angels is in the concise nature of the songs, and the relentless groove and pacier tempos.
Too trippy and washed in cathedrals of echo to be conventional rock, too rock 'n' roll to be shoegaze, too heavy to be indie, 'Guider' nevertheless locates Disappears in a lineage of vintage rock that can be charted without too much difficulty to the Velvet Underground, with the closing track, the sixteen-minute 'Revisting' sitting at the same table as 'Sister Ray' and Suicide's 'Ghostrider' as it builds a mesmerising wall of noise. Meanwhile, on 'New Fast,' they whip up a frenzy of distortion and delay that's enough to give the likes of My Bloody Valentine and A Place to Bury Strangers a run for their money.
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What sets 'Guider' apart is its full-on sound: it's the kind of dense wash of noise that deadens the air around the speakers, that has a real depth and multi-dimensionality. This is no doubt due in part to the recording process, which was intended to capture the band's live sound and imbue the tracks with a rare immediacy, reportedly 'using the first take on all but one of the tracks.'
We're also told that 'Disappears are so much about the NOW and not the THEN that they recorded over the same reels of tape that they used for their first album.' It might sound strange, but this sort of detail impresses me.
Above all, though, the dense, dark atmosphere is what really impresses, the end result being an album you can really get lost in.
Disappears Online
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