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Written by Jason Green Saturday, 28 October 2006 05:02

The songs are short, the band is tight, and the music is, by and large, bright and enjoyable.

 

Split LPs can be a dicey proposition. While the object of the game is to try to associate one band with another in the hopes of appealing to each other's fans, both bands can run the risk of accentuating their flaws when compared in such close quarters.

Such is the case with Your Living Room's All Over Me. Buffalo, N.Y., trio Lemuria open the proceedings with a high energy set packed mostly with two-minute emo-pop. When guitarist Sheena Ozzella handles lead vocals, as she does on almost all of the band's seven offerings, her melodic chirp of a voice pairs with the music as if Juliana Hatfield were fronting Rainer Maria. Drummer and occasional vocalist Alexander Kerns handles most of the songwriting, and his lyrics take some interesting turns ("I'm always the bee to kamikaze to save the queen," he has Ozzella sing on "Rough Draft"). The songs are short, the band is tight, and the music is, by and large, bright and enjoyable.

Kind of Like Spitting saunters in with track eight, and the differences couldn't be more glaring. The production quality nosedives into lo-fi territory, the guitars clanging and ringing with distortion. The songs stretch out to four to five minutes, and frequently extend into squealing instrumental sections. Ben Barnett's vocals tend toward unmelodic yelps. Are any of these things inherently bad? Not at all. But when compared to the pop shotgun blasts of Lemuria, KoLS's songs feel far longer and far sloppier than they really are. When each half of this split LP are analyzed separately, both bands have plenty to offer, but pairing them together doesn't work quite as well as advertised. B-

RIYL: Rainer Maria (Lemuria), Sonic Youth, ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead (Kind of Like Spitting)