Songs To Drive Wives Away

Accordion Crimes’ Songs To Drive Wives Away is a sonic assault. Shouted or spoken lyrics struggle to be heard over chaotic guitar riffs, humming bass lines, and clattering drums. The album begins and, before you even know what’s happening, you’re four songs deep into the seven-track album.

“Ouray” has a creeping, not-quite-poetry sound similar to that of early-’90s indie weirdos Slint, swinging wildly between riotous instrumentation and minimalist verses. It’s hard to get your bearings within the song, but the track is fun to listen to. It serves as both an homage to indie rock kingpins like the Pixies, and as something sorely missing from music today.

The strings that start “Forecast” quickly give way to more screeching guitar noise, while vocals fight for footholds in the wall of noise. It’s nearly six minutes of loud-quiet-loud madness, but luckily it’s followed up by “Super Soft Knife,” which is something of a breather from the rest of the album (the inevitable freak-out in it doesn’t happen until around five minutes in). This slow crawler is the album’s high point, offering probably the best songwriting on Songs To Drive Wives Away and sparse instrumentation that gives the song a nervous energy before it finally explodes in a fury of drums and chanted vocals.

The more expansive tracks on the second half of the album tend to overshadow the bursts of energy that open things up. The closing number, “Speaker,” is probably the most straightforward of the bunch, with a post-rock backing track supporting spoken-word vocals, making for a simple and, dare we say, peaceful way to wrap things up. As a whole, the album Songs To Drive Wives Away is some of the best work yet from one of Denver’s most interesting (and noisy) bands.