The Reptilian - Boy's Life [EP]

Count Your Lucky Stars

I'm dead diligent me, and really do my research. In some cases this spadework is absolutely essential, and given that the first track of "Boy's Life" is succinctly entitled 'I'll ram my ovipositor down your throat and lay my eggs in your chest, but I'm not an alien!' I reasoned that either the EP's contents were a college joke by the World of Warcraft crew, or the barking output of a bunch of Finns whose only access to the English language is via a pile of Yes albums.

As usual I was wrong, however the story's well worth telling; The Reptilian are a four piece from Kalamazoo, Michigan, but they don't as their song titles suggest like making proggy, Dream Theater-esque metal about goblins. Sonically they're much closer to the enigmatic Kentuckians Slint, whose album "Spiderland" still defines post-rock nearly twenty years after it's release.

Naturally then, "Boy's Life" defies the easy props and bland descriptors that music journalists like to use - I could say something like "it's a challenging listen" or "it extends the boundaries of indie to it's furthest limits." But when music is this brilliant and thrilling, full of irregular shapes, tempo shifts, stilted virtuosity and made just for the love of making it, the words frankly write themselves. Recorded in two days, it's a record which will be heard by two thousand people which deserves to have a hundred times that audience. I rarely write from this perspective of fan-dom - mostly because so much of what I hear is a lazy, cynical exorcism in exhumation - but every facet of these four songs attempts to render contrivances of style and presentation redundant, colliding with our prejudices in a way that should help you re-imagine the concept of the song.

Getting my hack-head back on again I could finish this piece with references to Fugazi and Tortoise - it's that good - but in short, I'll just say I like it.