Invite your best pals over for the evening via tin can telephone. Start a flower pot bonfire in the backyard and have the gang strum a clumsy rendition of “Shiver” on a couple of shoe box guitars. Drop paper snowflakes from your bedroom window.
Maxine’s “Shiver/Sand” lathe-cut is an artifact scavenged from the ruins of an ancient, walled-off city formerly inhabited by a civilization entirely devoted to DIY artistry. Cardboard skyscrapers line the remains of its skyline and an archive of Highlights Magazine back-issues is preserved in a vault beneath a library shaped like an oversized recycled carton of milk. A few xeroxed posters for basement shows still remain stapled to telephone poles.
The record’s A-side, the aforementioned “Shiver”, is a faded watercolor painted with percussive guitar chords and pointillist leads, lacquered with K Records vocal harmonies and framed by a border of fridge magnets. Its neighboring cut on the flip side, “Sand”, is a wafer-thin recording of piano improvisation that could easily be passed off as a “lost” composition meant to be included in Lou Barlow’s score for Harmony Korine’s Kids, perhaps in place the similarly desolate “Raise The Bells”.
Maxine exhibits a nearly perfect balance of coziness and cinematic expression on this brief release — Shiver/Sand is as suited to soundtrack your after-dinner Animal Crossing session as it is to correspond with a bout of emotional turmoil. Check it out below, and grab one of 14 copies via Captain Crook Records or Blade Records.