Listening to The Sheaves the other day made listen to The Fours who released an amazing LP on World of Birds. I decided to listen to more from this Cleveland, Ohio label.
I settled first on Son of Dribble and pretty much stayed there for a while. There's a definite sound-adjacent feel to The Sheaves and The Fours. But this also reminds me of Former Bullies whose LP on Belfast label CF Records remains on heavy rotation for me.
Son of Dribble are based in Columbus, Ohio. Don't forget to check out The Fours (listen/buy).
the sheaves — A Salve for Institution (Dot Dash Sounds/SDZ)
The sheaves, from Arizona, make music out of disintegration, out of entropy, out of the center not holding. Two guitars battle in screeching, trebly agitation, way up on the neck in close, painful intervals. The vocals, often doubled, talking over one another, mutter lethargic, illegible poetry over the bump and clangor of post-punk catharsis. A tootling keyboard drifts into view, its mad circus vibe not at all cheerful, more haunted and eerie. The drums flail wildly trying to keep this fractious stew of sensations in some sort of order; it works about a quarter of the time.
The band’s last album, Excess Death Cult, came out on Minimum Table Stacks in 2023, with much the same anarchic energy. In my review, I observed, “Like end-stage Fall, the sheaves are always falling apart, always dissolving into chemicals, always losing the thread. Listening to Excess Death Cult Time is like trying to make sense of a dream you’re having, not later, but while it’s still going on.” Nothing in Salve for Institution has changed my mind about his fascinating, enticing but off-putting band.
Except that maybe, the last one had a couple of semi-bops, if you can extend your definition of “bop” to include the swampier territories of GBV, the more obstreperous, late-period regions of the Fall. This one is harsher and more confrontational all the way through, its riffs going off like rubber bands made of barbed wire, snapping back to hurt people, yet snapping all the same. The sheaves scrawl in black sharpie on industrial grade sandpaper, emphatic but blurred enough at the edges that you can’t quite make out what’s going on.
They start right in the middle of things with “Toilet of Venus,” a scrum of guitars caught mid-sentence in a continuing rant, as the singer mutters disconsolately, over enunciating but never quite making himself clear. It ends suddenly in a souring chord, which hangs like the dust the Road Runner leaves after he’s jetted off to parts unknown.
Songs like “In Center (X-Static)” groove slouchily, mired in inertia. Riffs like Saints’ outtakes rage then slip under a muck of hiss and static, but the siren-y call to arms gets through. “Dull Harem” jitters a la Bog Shed drunk on cough syrup, its hammering cadence of guitar/bass/drums slurred over with narcotized chant. The sheaves are under no obligation to make things pretty for you; they’d rather smear sharp contours with messy drawls.
And those are the “song” songs. “To Leave Sanctuary” emerges out of inchoate drone, a bit of the Stooges “Dirt” in its detuned howl. Dual guitars ping blues bent dissonances. The vocals overlap, talking past each other, a word or phrase (“Can you imagine that?”) occasionally breaking through.
You can’t quite make sense of the sheaves’ music, it is powerful anyway, and maybe the struggle to understand it contributes to the appeal. “Sanctum Cross” is a pop song with a 100 needles sticking out of it. Grasp it hard, and you’ll end up bloody, but admire it from a step away, and you’ll see it glitter.
Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.
So in a land where all days are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay –
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.
the sheaves — Excess Death Cult Time (Minimum Table Stacks)
We can’t seem to find a photo of the sheaves, but this came up in the image search.
Excess Death Cult Time by the sheaves
If you’re going to compare the sheaves to the Fall, fair enough, but let’s be clear. The reference point is not the hooky, keyboard-lighted Fall of the Brix years, they of “C.R.E.E.P.” and “Cruiser’s Creek.” No, this is more like the late dystopic Fall, the slurry, spitty years following Country on the Click, where Mark E. Smith drawled madly on over disintegrating textures of rock-adjacent guitar noise. Like end-stage Fall, the sheaves are always falling apart, always dissolving into chemicals, always losing the thread. Listening to Excess Death Cult Time is like trying to make sense of a dream you’re having, not later, but while it’s still going on.
The title track, for instance, starts with a bass haring off in an indeterminant direction, and someone coughing. Soon, two more guitars are at it, noodling high and not in any recognizable key, at odds with one another, but possibly making the convergent points. (Imagine a bar fight where two drunks are yelling at each other at increasing volume but, weirdly, yelling the same thing.) The drums very nearly hold things together, or at least keep them in the same room, but chaos roils underneath, always ready to spew up out of the murk. And over all this, the singer, drones disconsolately, his voice discernible mostly as a buzz but occasionally taking shape in words, i.e., “Are you losing your hair, it’s passing you by, it’s passing you by, it’s a lovely excess death cult time.” The song is a mess of sharp-edged parts clanking together.
This is a band not afraid to try out a song called “Guitar Wank,” which, true to its name, gives a pair of players license to do whatever the fuck, in concert and conflict with a high noodling keyboard, also wandering untethered. The song coalesces out of parts, taking shape from dream-like voices, doubled, but slightly out of sync, and a snaggle of intertwined dissonance. Imagine staring at tangled piles of junkyard wires until you can see the shapes of animals in them (and then staring longer, until these shapes disappear). This is what listening to “Guitar Wank” is like.
Not that it’s unpleasant, especially if you’ve been weaned on folk-noise-industrial eccentrics like Siltbreeze’s Pink Reason and CIA Debutant. If it were easier to get to the songs, you might not bother. Everybody loves a challenge. And so, perhaps, it’s worth mentioning that two songs on this disc come together right away, not exactly welcoming you in, but at least opening the door.
“Hit Silly” is the real ringer here, with its rumbling shimmy of electric guitars and half swallowed vocals giving it a cracking, staticky sheen like early Guided by Voices. It’s considerable signal cuts through the noise. Indeed, it’s anthemic the way the guitar chords shift in inevitable ways. There’s a clear progression and none of the antic scrabbling in corners, the mumbled venom, the chaos.
“Lariat Slung” makes it a party, too, with its thundery bass and antic carnival keyboards. The singer elides and swallows the words, muttering ominously most of the time then breaking into startling clarity. “Oh there’s nothing to do, all of the time, oh say, I feel sick, all of the time.” You might feel a little woozy yourself by this point, but in a good kind of way.
As I heard "No Lateral Line" from The Sheaves (Phoenix, Arizona) I thought three things: first, this doesn't sound like current music. Second, this reminded me of The Fall and The Herms.
Wow. If I was taking a Snooping the Bandcamp test, I would have gotten 100% since those three observations were made on January 28, 2024 when we posted about their debut LP.
"A Slave For Institution" is due on June 20th via Dot Dash Sounds and SDZ. None other than Tom Lax (Siltbreeze) wrote a short review on the Bandcamp page which included the following observation regarding The Sheaves as "an outfit of desert peccaries whose swinley snouts have expertly strung together another string of stinging pearls for thine earholes."
Minimum Table Stacks has released another gem. Unlike many previous releases, this is a new band, although it sounds as if The Sheaves could be from the early 1980s.
This kind of reminds me of The Fall or Swell Maps. But the vocals recall the sound of the unheralded Herms.
