Previous Tunabunny albums have always been marked by the occasional detours away from their Pylon-accented noise-pop blueprint & into more experimental sound collage territory, but on Kingdom Technology, they’ve fully given themselves over to those once-brief shortcuts toward non-linearity & the off-kilter sound glitches resulting from their choice to record this latest LP on an imperfect sound input device apparently liberated from a dumpster at the University of Georgia. They’ve also been eating some serious dub for breakfast & it shows, like during the six opening minutes of “Airless Spaces,” with its repetitive mutant disco bass/drums groove & submerged spectral vocals (from guitarists Brigette Adair Herron & Mary Jane Hassell), or “Save it Up,” with a decidedly warped & wobbly early-80s ZE Records-style electronic pulse. I think their greatest successes come when they take their stabs at short & sweet fuzzed-out pop songs & there’s a few such gems scattered amongst the musique concrete manipulations here – namely “Coming For You,” with the sort of sharp hook & sublime harmonies that most power-pop bands would kill for & “Canaries in Mineshafts,” which is barely over a minute long & sounds kind of like a female-fronted Chairs Missing-era Wire wrapped around some gloriously messy Sonic Youth guitar noise. That being said, I’m still curious what they’ll dig out of the trash for their next album.
