WZT Hearts

I love how smaller cities can be identified by musical style. Los Angeles, NYC, Chicago ... for the most part, forget it! The metropolises tend to be amalgamations of dozens -- no, hundreds -- of musical styles, genres, tastes, aesthetics, whatever.

For some reason, though, "smaller" cities -- like Detroit, Portland, Austin, etc. -- and their music subcultures can be defined more succinctly and aptly with just a few broad categories and keywords.
Baltimore for me will continue to be the experimental noise capital of the U.S. (aside from maybe Rhode Island or something).

WZT Hearts (MySpace), along with acts like Ecstatic Sunshine, Dan Deacon, and -- if you wanna get technical -- Panda Bear/Animal Collective, is front lining a new noise movement. WZT Hearts in particular sounds like this majestic merging of Black Dice and Thurston Moore/Sonic Youth. Noisey, gritty, jagged, awkward, and unstable at times, but simultaneously ambient, atmospheric, and distant, calming even ...

It's as though the noise and feedback and all that crap becomes so massive, so overbearing, that it ceases to be paid attention to actively, that it just slowly dissolves into the background -- whatever that is for you specifically -- and adds to your whole world ...

Maybe that's too ethereal and spooky an assertion. Buy some stuff from Carpark Records. Awesome.

WZT Hearts - 2
WZT Hearts - 4