Stills

With practically no dependence on laptop recording tricks, Stills sounds completely lost in another era, and all the darker and truer for it.

Stills explores its feelings of hurt and misgiving more deftly with its music than with its lyrics; if you’re sick of Dick and Barry types, the darkly-focused new wave avant-pop of Stills can still offer its rewards.

This is ultimately a transitory record, its gate-crashing momentum tempered by songs that feel like holdovers from Gauntlet Hair’s more whimsical debut. With Stills’ crisper production cleaning up the band’s formative psych-pop splatter, the album’s more sanguine tracks.

It’s not perfect, but strong songwriting philosophy like this deserves to be noted and heard.

The album's most obvious failing is the way in which the vocals are presented and mixed. [No. 101, p.55]

It's filled with cool sounds, and makes for an interesting listen, but it’s not engaging. It leaves the listener unfeeling, untouched.

Marred by a lack of discipline, but bursting with a deliciously bleak, psychotropic allure, Stills's capricious spirit is ultimately its greatest strength and its most glaring fault.

It’s just that Stills loses this sense of purpose and intensity when Gauntlet Hair opts for creating the shadowy, haunting atmosphere that settles over the much of the album, with many of the experiments resembling a stylistic jumble that neither showcases the band’s undercover catchiness nor brings out the darker impulses they seem hell bent on exploring.

It’s a darker, angrier album and it shows that the duo is adventurous, but the experiments don’t quite cohere.

At only 31 minutes long, there is absolute bewilderment at how varied the output on Stills can be; it’s an exhausting listen in general.

It’s very hard to understand where the identity of the band will finally settle when it alters its mask so numerously and swiftly across these ten disparate tracks.

They wrongly assume dark tones will lead to increased substance, a mistake that sees Stills burn out in a banal fog of distortion. [Aug-Sep 2013, p.102]

Somewhere under all this reverb and murk, Gauntlet Hair may yet have the makings of a fine band, but the album burns out long before they have an opportunity to reveal wether this is true.