No Pain In Pop

Chapel Noise

Photography by Forrest B. Payne

People don’t seem to write ’songs’ any more. Most of today’s avant-rock motley seem keener to replicate the ‘tracks’ of dance music, tapping into the repetitious and blood-bound power of loops so that finite structure disappears, leaving four minutes of sound you’re sure have been playing forever somewhere and will go on playing long after your ears leave them behind. Night Control, the work of Rosemead, California’s Christopher Curtis Smith, feels like a collision between the song-built narratives of old modernity and the current blossoming of pop into aural omnipresence, one bristling up against the other like crematory fires to balsa wood. Smith’s pop - recalling fragments of sound lost on long train rides by The Beatles, Tom Petty, Jonathan Richman, Dylan, Velvets - isn’t buried beneath a slop of noise. Rather the noise goes skidding into the soft pop like an express train bursting through a blue whale’s heart, red membrane scattered this way and that, spectacular confusion reigning in the slow motion millennia before anyone feels a thing.

‘Good Looks’ and ‘For The Lanes’ are taken from Death Control, an album out now through Kill Shaman records. Thanks to Matthew Mondanile for the tip on this one.



MP3: Night Control - Good Looks



MP3: Night Control - For The Lanes

Tags: christopher curtis smith, death control, kill shaman, night control