“Everything Disappears” is a pretty great album title for a band that keeps sticking around. It’s been more than a decade since Nice Breeze formed somewhere between D.C. and Northern Virginia, but back in November, after a long, strange drip of digital releases, the trio finally issued its first vinyl record — the kind of black plastic saucer that scientists say might take more than a millennia to biodegrade. As for the music, it’s aptly encoded with cosmic winks and shrugs — layers of paradoxical noises that feel messy and mannered, casual and serious, loose and tight, hungry and wise. Try to imagine three Xers drilling down on some median coordinate between early Pavement, earlier Half Japanese and earliest Sonic Youth, then try not to, because the more you listen this stuff, the more Nice Breeze sounds like an entity unto itself.
At first, it’s vocalist Andy Fox who makes the band’s shaggy clang feel so personal, with lyrics that contemplate the fates of strangers in restaurants, the provenance of unnamed tattoos, the metaphysical implications of “diplomatic immunity,” and more. When Fox’s phrasing falls off the beat like a toppled beverage, it’s that much easier to clock drummer Martha Hamilton’s locomotive steadiness — a rhythmic dependability that also frees John Howard to make his guitar jangle, mumble and gnash. Melodies and textures continuously swap roles as foreground and background. If you’ve forgotten what a band sounds like, this is it. Different people being themselves, together.
And while Howard is credited with recording “Everything Disappears” in a modest Arlington basement, the album’s distinctive lo-fi sound isn’t the result of circumstance. With today’s home recording software, making songs this rumpled and unclean requires effort, and Nice Breeze put meticulous care into the mess-making. Sometimes we get entangled, like when the guitars go fritzy during the album closer “PS Brix!” — it sounds more like our earbuds shorting out than a guitar amp glitch. Where is this music happening, exactly?
Fox’s stumbly phrasing feels just as absorbing. Over the Suicide-shaped groove of the title track, he gets caught holding too many syllables and not enough song, then growls with an irritation he might have learned from Jeff Mentges of No Trend. “Everything disappears,” Fox declares, as if now reading a life-changing fortune cookie. “Sometimes it takes seconds, sometimes it takes years.” (On the following track, “Now What,” he cracks open a second one: “There is so, so much frustration. Do not leave it unexplored.”)
The album’s clanking keystone, “Hope,” finds Fox and Hamilton singing about trying to channel a time “back when we had hope,” reminding us that — oh right — this music is being made by three people past 50. “Now it feels like failure not to have proper glassware,” Fox deadpans, sending the point home. But when the refrain circles back, it’s your age that matters more than theirs: “Some people feel the rain. Other people just get wet. Some people feel the pain others haven’t yet.”
Nice Breeze performs Jan. 9 at 7 p.m. at Rhizome, 6950 Maple St. NW. $10-20.
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