reviews / 2014

INSTITUTE - Salt Ep

Name: INSTITUTE – Salt Ep
Item: Salt Ep
Rating: 7
Author: Lorenzo Pagani

2014 (Sacred Bones)

post-punk

by Lorenzo Pagani

Listen to Institute, a young four-piece Texan band, and your mind immediately goes to the early Iceage: those sounds halfway between Warsaw e Crisis, the successful compromise between raw energy and dark moods, the spontaneity of an adolescent rage: there are no shortage of traits in common with Elias Bender Rønnenfelt's band.

Sacred Bones, a genuine talent-scout of the underground, set their sights on the band after seeing them in action in their native Austin, also drawn in by the quality of their early recordings: an Ep and a 7″ released by the lesser-known (but equally “switched-on”) Deranged Records (Canadian, home to bands like White Lung and Eagulls, though the roster is truly endless) and Katorga Works (from Brooklyn).

"Salt" contains five songs, all previously unreleased: it kicks off in fourth gear with title track, a track that undoubtedly owes a debt to sound of the Joy Division, even though this seems like an alternate version of them, where the Manchester quartet is fronted by John Lydon rather than by Ian Curtis. A surge of adrenaline erupts from Moses Brown's voice: abrasive, born of the most sincere punk, it towers over a ensemble where the bass is just as much the protagonist as the cutting guitar, here accompanied by a drumming precise, martial.

The band then floors the accelerator with the formidable “Nausea” – a genuine “loose cannon” of a track that lasts all of a minute – before slowing down for the following “Familiar Stranger” and “Immorality”, steeped in the murkiest (though always punchy) positive-punk. A dark thread that culminates in the obsessions of “In Absence”, their longest track, tasked with closing out “Salt”.

Five shoots of rebellion stamped with a strong personality, yet firmly rooted in all the “right” soil. Institute thus land another blow, putting together a short but highly incisive work: now we wait to see how they fare over a longer distance, hoping they don't lose the “drive” of these early compositions.

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04/11/2014

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Lorenzo Pagani, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition