Singles

Whirlwind Heat - Air Miami

Tim Miller 04/08/2006

Rating: 2/5

Whirlwind Heat must be doing something for someone, somewhere, because this EP follows the release of their third album, Types of Wood. The three members, whose instruments consist of a drum kit, a bass and a Moog synthesiser, make sparse, dirty, low register electro. Blobs of synth sounds and menial bass riffs make for a testing listen in terms of the music on title track Air Miami, yet the lack of lyrical creativity playing second fiddle to the music makes for a poor first song indeed.

Brass samples and laser sounds on Same Maiden Name, with far wryer lyrics, raise the bar a bit more, which following track Backhand more than matches. Sounding at last more complete than the previous songs and faintly like The Flaming Lips, with crashing cymbals and splashes of squelchy bass and electro drones, Backhand is the song here that actually most resembles a song.

I Fucked Up Air Miami sees a twist on the first title track, with an acoustic guitar and padded drum accompaniment providing the base to this new version. A kazoo, ping pong balls and a radio station commentating on a tennis match means this truly strange EP closes with the words Thirty, fifteen. It doesn't make sense, but, really, nothing else has so far anyway. The Air Miami EP's sparse wastelands of sounds and seemingly meaningless lyrics inspire a feeling of helplessness, a lo-fi mist which appears impossible to escape. While it does have a hypnotic attraction, one which might be suited to getting finely stoned at 3am in the morning, an entire album of this stuff would probably drive almost anyone to drink.


Released 14th August on Brille Records.