Four boys of Los Angeles, also rather nerd in the sembianza (I must say), record in one held Spanish the 33 second most canonical traces dictates me of the rock therefore as we know it: a bottom, one battery, one voice, one keyboard and naturally one guitar. To made things they are closed in study and post-they are produced, king-mixano, re-inventano with the aid of nient’ other that two laptop. . .
“Terrorbird may be the result of what happens when people can’t sing or write verses and choruses, but the eagerness for experimenting offsets the Los Angeles band’s screaming and yelling (one track, ironically, takes on harmonies).”
“The young lads of The Mae Shi sing nothing like Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. Their shout-sing averages an octave or so above his baritone-to-bass growl and wail. But their music itself is as close in spirit, if not always technique, to the Magic Band’s as anyone is likely to get.”
“Greater than the sum of it’s parts, Terrorbird bubbles over with ideas, screaming anger, squeaking joy, bird chanting, snippets of hip post-punk, electronic flourishes and, mostly, speed.”
“All around us is confusion: one boy hands over his snare to an audience member, who starts pummeling a tribal beat. A girl finds a guitar lifted over her shoulder. She looks at it warily, like it might suddenly burst into flame. The microphone has long since disappeared. Party calls are thrown into the crowd and onto the ground. Shrill whoopee noises add to the mayhem. Streamers drape heads and glasses . . . People are yelling. Feedback shreds amplifiers. Chairs fall to the ground.”
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had a band that is so genuinely concerned about having a good time with its fans. If 5RC were a religion, then the Mae Shi show would be its backwoods tent revival.”
“Yes, this is music that all the cool people will like. The people with the dyed black hair and the tight T-shirts and the body odor. The Mae Shi plays noisy, spastic, psycho-dance music that, at high volumes, threatens to induce seizure.”
“But to the very devil, say I, with the tyranny of the individual, and a twenty devil way with anybody who doesn’t like the Mae Shi.”
“Still, who could’ve predicted the totality of that situation? That the pocket-protector crew would become the alpha males of harder-and-faster fuck-your-ears über-rock? That heavy and spastic head-shaking rock would be saved and dominated by kids like The Mae Shi, a bunch of obvious swirly fodder from SoCal with not just Attention Deficit, but Attention Rejection Disorder? That some of the most fist-shaking cool-guy rock of the new millennia would appear on records with titles like To Hit Armor Class Zero?.”
“Terrorbird twitches with truer Tourette’s-stricken spasms. Songs like the wordplayful “Virgin’s Diet, The Hand of Wolves” and “Hieronymus Bosch is a Dead Man” rev into racing, wild life – buoyed by buried bass lines as antic as anything Nation of Ulysses ever conceived – but then die on a dime, no deceleration, just a sudden stop and some mangled mainframe bleeps. It’s incredibly inexplicable, and inexplicably incredible.”
“Wonked-out spazzmodicism hasn’t been this au courant since 1992, when the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282/Sun City Girls tour ripped ears new assholes. Los Angeles quartet the Mae Shi follows this well-paved road, offering its own brand of wiggy excess, only doing more with less.”
“Veering from careering Minutemannish agit-pop to enervated electro-tinkering to brain-battering Beefheartian brickbats, Terrorbird’s 33 tracks in 42 minutes are a wild ride.”
“This is as close to a one-paragraph description one could give The Mae Shi’s latest record Terrorbird. It’s frantic, catchy, never boring and constantly changing. It’s very much what most modern music is lacking. The thing that makes this record so hard to review is not only the diversity of influences and musical styles that the band has obviously ventured into, but also the fact that there is not really any song on the album that could be classified as a single. It’s all just a little bit too weird.”
“But there’s no slavish or idle idol worship here, not even for our collective aggro-spaz heroes. No, what the Mae Shi do is [SECRET!], it’s throwing mason jars at your hoary preconceptions just to watch both shatter; it’s taking the spirit of bands like the Minutemen, Big Boys, DNA, and Boredoms (and OK, some of the fall-down-the-stairs clatter of the latter too) and running down the truth for ears new and old.”
l disco procede così, alternando linearità e destrutturazione,
rapido come un proiettile, in una sequenza di ‘esercizi di stile’, dai
titoli più o meno improbabili (’Hieronymus Bosh is a dead man’,
‘Vampire Zoo’, e la lista potrebbe continuare).
Most drivers avoid potholes in the road. Well, The Mae Shi, they try to hit each and every single one. And it’s more than just trying, too. The act of seeking out these irregularities in a once smooth and solid fixture is what comprehensively defines the band.
Two brothers (no they aren’t tigers) and four best friends smash, scream and harmonize these 33 tracks in 41 minutes and 33 seconds. The Mae Shi is handmade and home recorded like nothing you’ve heard before. Bottom line? Cut and paste art punk for fans of Devo, Whirlwind Heat and the Boredoms.
“Los Angeles panic-rockers the Mae Shi have joined this year’s growing list of artists (Jadakiss, Ghostface, Diplo, Ratatat) who are getting more acclaim for their promo street discs than for their official albums. Carrying the post-2ManyDJs phenomenon to its ultimate absurdist conclusion, Mae Shi 2004 Mix CD crams three-second snippets of 200 songs (Abba to Jay Z, Patsy Cline to Melt Banana, Steely Dan to Hüsker Dü, even an Andrew W.K. megamix) into a 70-minute free-associative history of everything.”
“I don’t think we made a hip-hop record. Tim thinks we made a hip-hop record.”
“And over the course of 41 minutes, they manage to kick, pound, program, grind, bleep and scream through just about every type of noise you can imagine, all the while dangling faint hints of melodic structure right in front of your nose.”
“it’s one of the few records i can listen to at work without getting all uppity and shit.”
“Terrorbird features multiple songs with the titles “Revelation,” “Chop,” “Bite,” and “Body,” and it ends with five consecutive tracks called “Repetition,” each of which contains the same stunted riff and refrain, played as dance-punk, skronk, and piano balladry. Imagination and ambition pop up all over Terrorbird.”
“The Mae Shi skips happily across the line between experimental and annoying.”
