Lemuria - The First Collection

I have a friend who's probably a dozen times more qualified to review this collection and talk about this band. I'm probably gonna ask her to do an article on them in the future, but right now the spirit has actually hit me and I need to write something before I return to indifference.

Lemuria is a pop-punk/indie pop 3-piece from upstate New Yawk with dual male and female vocals I discovered right before their full length Get Better dropped in 2008. My mp3 player was in the shitter at the time (since I dropped it in a stream mid-song due to an apparent lack of foresight), and I was forced to download a couple albums onto my trendy phone to keep me company on the obnoxiously loud bus rides to and from campus. Due to the wonder of the internet, I've had a semi-difficult time giving each album I've DOWNLOADED ILLEGALLY the proper amount of time to sink in. Considering how little space was available on my phone, I figured this would be a good opportunity to pile in some stuff I wasn't entirely familiar with to see if sparks would fly upon repeat listens. While it turns out that Tuesday's Freewheelin' is nauseatingly corny, Latterman's Turn Up The Punk We'll Be Singing is almost like injecting distilled boredom into your eardrums, and the pre-Wilhelm Scream band Smackin' Isaiah realized the full extent of their shittiness early on, Lemuria's First Collection somehow didn't wear itself out over the course of two months and actually became a favorite of mine.

I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this documents everything the band did from their formation in 2004 up to the last release before their 2008 LP. Usually, I would break this into individual releases to cover here, but therein lies the appeal of this compilation: every EP this is comprised of is relatively short, so I get the feeling that a lot of love and care went into perfecting every song on here; fortunately, though, the production on each effort is similar enough that it doesn't feel like you're listening to a mash of different records in a row, but one cohesive piece with a lot of variation and multiple recording sessions' worth of energy. As I said before, Lemuria's vocal front is XX/XY, with guitarist Sheena typically taking the lead and sounding like a less erratic version of Alison Mosshart circa-Discount; drummer Alex is more along the lines of Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening, pulling a monotone slur that complements the more crisp leads. I've heard the non-term "progressive punk" bandied around this band's camp recently, and it took me a while to even guess what the fuck it's supposed to be in reference to. People know that "progressive rock" was an approximation of classical music using rock instruments, right? "Progressive" isn't a catchall term for bands that happen to use weird time signatures sometimes. That said, Lemuria do have very few songs with the traditional pop structuring (and do utilize some odd timings in most of their riffs) but isn't it easier to call them a pop-punk/indie band that isn't generic? Either way, almost every track on here is great (except "The Origamists". I really don't like that song.), and as I said before, the fact that this is pieced together from a bunch of different studio sessions gives it a lot of diversity, both in mood and sound without ever straying too far away from what makes them sound so appealing (except "The Origamists", again).

I was going to post a video for "Bristles And Whiskers", which is my favorite song of theirs, but unfortunately the only semi-passable video youtube had featured Ben Barnett of Kind Of Like Spitting sharing the vocals for some reason. "In A World Of Ghosts" is probably one of their most accessible songs, so it seems like a good alternative:


Download here
then
Buy here

Their two LPs that preceded this are good, too (one of which *technically* hasn't been released yet), but something about them just doesn't appeal to me as much as this does. I don't even think it's sentiment, for once. Oh, and go see them live if you get the chance. My friend Tess and I got to see them play a gross little acoustically-horrific, capacity-breached basement a month ago, and they still ended up being a lot of fun.