Earring’s guitar sounds like it’s constantly in flames as Nunn Ones burns its way across the nine tracks. And Jason Balla, who sings in the band, could care less that the thing he’s strumming is currently on fire. Or, it’s not that he doesn’t care exactly, he’s just so used to it scorching his blistered and blackened palms, he’s willing to let his jaw drop as far as possible for the delivery, and his words crawl their way out of that gaping maw accordingly into rolling pastures of baritone. By now you should know: This one has “the gaze.” And the gaze is not a gaze without the gaze. It’s focused, eyes shooting through the shoes and the floor and the foundation and concrete and dirt like laser beams all the way to the molten core of the Earth — That place where apathy and boredom is so… intense. And important and crucial and scorching hot. And heavy, too, weighing down on Earring’s barrage with the ballads dangling from their earlobes like barbells. Drums bang away back in their cave, and the group’s collective eyelids droop down with exhaustion on their way to a fitful sleep. But they will dream from their fourth-floor ratty Chicago apartments of stuff like red convertibles running up and down the coast. A perfect addition to the midwest’s recent crop of ‘gazers, fitting nicely into the Manic Static catalog or alongside some of Lillerne’s recent outings.
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