“Post-Mae Shi, even three-minute pop songs begin to sound long. Do we ever need to hear more than one verse by 50 Cent? In a world of movie jump cuts and Internet surfing, it’s a wonder that the three-minute pop song has remained intact. The Mae Shi are more than capable of writing three-minute hits, but let’s hope they never take Ritalin. As the human attention span dwindles, the Mae Shi’s one-minute anthems may well become the pop hits of tomorrow.”
“I think our records are basically pop records . . . we’re not hard to get or anything — I mean, you can bob your head to us, right?”
“It’s music that’ll sound new to some listeners but at its core it’s essentially pop music, or at least pieces of it cobbled together into frantic, energetic songs.”
“It’s music that’ll sound new to some listeners but at its core it’s essentially pop music, or at least pieces of it cobbled together into frantic, energetic songs.”
“It’s music that’ll sound new to some listeners but at its core it’s essentially pop music, or at least pieces of it cobbled together into frantic, energetic songs.”
“Like an ADD child raised on Sesame Street tapes on fast forward, you get the feeling that nothing holds the Mae Shi’s attention for very long. The LA band likes to make short, frantic, yelping, bleating songs. Last year’s Terrorbird was a spastic call to arms for freak-punkists everywhere, blasting through 31 songs in about 40 minutes. But the truly amazing thing was the breadth of sounds they were able to capture in those 40 short minutes. As makers of mix-tapes and sound collages, the band seemed equally adept at furiously channeling post-punk gods, creating lilting hip-hop beats, evangelical bird-screeching, grooving to funk then easing into a lucious glitch-pop ballad. Rather than a collection of short songs, the album was a bloody, bleating whole, borrowing ideas from one song to the next, revisting riffs in a thematically tight whole. “
“Based in Los Angeles, the Mae Shi is a quirky bunch. The members — Ezra Buchla, Brad Breeck, and Tim and Jeff Byron — pride themselves in recording their own material (and they are learning as they go), but they also like to make their own instruments. Their live show, which is unpredictable but always loud and fun, never goes longer than fifteen minutes.”
“God bless the good folks at 5 Rue Christine and their stalwart appreciation for the seemingly inappreciable.”
“The Mae Shi may be the perfect band for a generation weaned on audio clips. Want to hear this song? You just did! If only rock criticism could be so succinct.”
“The Mae Shi are a punk band in the truest sense of the term: they blitz their way through their music with no regard for traditional songwriting, production or recording techniques. They build their own instruments the same way they build their songs, soldering together whatever pieces are at their disposal. It’s a maddening and exhilarating experience.”
“What starts out as a sound check instantly morphs into a syncopated agglomeration of stomping broomball shoes bass, straight punk drums, three note riff rock, and half grisly spoken, half screamed vocals . . . “
“The Mae Shi plays rock and roll for the ADHD masses. They play tightly packed songs that sound as though they have been conceived in a pressure cooker. Everything sounds as though the wheels are on the very edge of falling off. Some out of control bus careening down a hill with the break lines cut just for some added excitement.”
“Man, I love the Mae Shi. Each release is better than the next. They just released Heartbeeps on Tuesday and it’s absolutely unreal. This quickly worked its way into my top 5 of the year so far, with a bullet. The riff is pure fire, and once the drums kick in there’s no turning back. It’s just this ridiculous, driving song. I don’t even want to use stupid critical descriptions. They don’t do the song justice and just sound tired anyway.”
“The 15-year-old version of me loves The Mae Shi. The songs on their second release for Kill Rock Stars imprint 5RC carry all the hallmarks of what my inner child holds near and dear: fucked up guitars, anarchic rhythms, singers barely in control of their vocal chords.”
“In my review of the Mae Shi’s first LP, last year’s Terrorbird, I wrote that a big problem I had with the band is that I felt that they were having more fun than a listening audience possibly could. “
“i seriously know nothing about this band but this song off their record heartbeeps is full of great ideas all stapled to each other. if i saw them play this live, i would flip the fuck out, right? it leaves that rock tunnel into spidery synth oscillations + drum machine jitters and then ROPES THAT BULL RIGHT THE FUCK BACK.”
“If “Terrorbird” was a splatterfest, an idea-stuffed rant from excitable youngsters, “Heartbeeps” shows as much maturation as you could or should expect from musicians so plainly devoted to ‘80s spazcore. Which is to say: it’s great. They’re still running with the Urinals-ish punch-and-lurch technique, but the bass springs to life, and enlivens more songs, on this EP than on their previous work. “Crimes of Infancy” coalesces from a bumping rant into a churning punk lecture into, finally, a Whovian power finale. “
“Ca chatouille sous les bras, ça glisse dans le slip, une vraie anguille, c’est Mae Shi.”
The Mae-Shi is a Los Angeles quartet where everyone sings, sometimes loudly and all at once; this befits much of the musical careening and inane sloganeering it indulges in.”
the story also goes that they were signed to their record label via instant messager. . . .Allegedly recorded on a budget of only $120, their debut album, Terrorbird, jumps around in a manic state of energy and you can almost see the four members of the band running around and tearing up walls in the process of recording.
” ???????????????? ????????????!”
Old Testament tales sung by a banned sect of utopians. They know poet is merely another translation of the word prophet.
So far, the press have made this Los Angeles quartet out to be a bunch of radical noise merchants eager to be as unlistenable as possible. The band seem to play up this perception too, but listeners might be mistaking their spirit for abrasion. The Mae Shi translate a kind of all-encompassing irreverence into sound, but they don’t, as some have said, knock the audience out of the way in the process.
I’m pretty much of the mind that stop-start dance punk bands are boring as shit, so it surprises me that I like this record at all. The Mae Shi – Ezra, Brad, Jeff and Tim, respectively — are the ADD afflicted poster children for Los Angeles’ experimental hardcore/no-wave scene. Up until now, I’ve never considered them really savvy enough (ala Deerhoof) to produce particularly credible material, or subversive enough (see: Erase Errata) for me to give a fuck either way.
In a way, the whole of Terrorbird operates as one long track, more so than with most albums. It can be difficult to tell where one song ends and the next begins if you’re not looking at the display. Maybe that’s why it’s one of the few rock records I can listen to at work without getting all uppity and shit.
“Ma con qualche melodia in più e, sparsi qui e là, accenni di riff hard rock (Revelation three e Takoma the dolphin is awl ). E ancora, demenza disco (Vampire beats). Devo. DNA. Maldestro pop elettronico (Body 2). Electro da ospedale psichiatrico (Terror bird). I Brainiac in acido (Vampire zoo). I Gang Of Four in preda a spasmi (Repetition).”
I think I’ll be giving this to a friend who likes to dance to weirdo music.
