| Listening
to the debut album of Chicago’s cyclesomething, I often had to remind myself that
this band is only a power trio. The dense guitar sounds coming from these recordings is
something guitar-wielding vocalist are not usually able to produce. Frontman William
Darling plays all the guitars on this album, proving his ability to reproduce the sounds
of a large field of influences. The descending guitar chords in "Man on a
Mission" mimics the sounds and shape of early Stooges and Sonic Youth recordings. The
finger-picking acoustic guitars and rolling bass line float over drummer Corey
Goldstein’s floor tom rhythm to produce a feel akin to Fleetwood Mac‘s
"Tusk." This grab-bag of influences might make you think that cyclesomething
could not have a concrete "sound," but the album doesn’t seem to jump all
over the place and manages to maintain coherency quite well.
Much of solidity of the band’s sound
resides in Darling’s vocals. Simple melody lines that hang onto the root of each
chord enhance the band’s talent for creating songs that feel more like sound-scapes
than tunes. Most of the time this technique is very effective, but I cannot help but wish
that Darling would occasionally branch out from his standard vocal emotion which I can
only describe as complacency. Nibandh Nadkarni adds to the creative sound-scapes of the
album with his inventive use of keyboards and piano. Though not appearing in every track
of Hailey’s Brushes, the keyboards are an integral part of the album. Tracks
such as "Stop Making Sense" are a showcase Nadkarni’s gift for creating
sparkling melodies that flicker around the edges of Darling’s dense, crunchy guitar
chords.
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