If anything good has come of starting the forum on this site, it’s been finding a slew of new bands worth checking out. The latest in that lineage (it’s longer than you might think) is mathy Portland, Oregon, outfit Mongoloid Village, whose name I saw because they’re opening for YOB and Dark Castle in their hometown on Aug. 9. Their entire self-released record, Folly, is streaming at their Bandcamp page.

It goes by quick (more of an EP than full-length), and there are some parts that are pretty manic, but the Melvins riffs meet with some angular noise-type influences, and the result is heavy and modern enough to still sound fresh but not like some band who’s just tech because they feel like noodling for seven minutes in a song. “The Albina Leprechaun” makes no bones about where it comes from stylistically, but Mongoloid Village put their own stamp on what they do across all seven of these tracks, and I dig it. “Nocturnal Emissions” gets off on some Houdini weirdness and “MS Drunk: A Sober Assessment” throws some melody in the guitar late in the song to hook you for the rest.

They have an element of that skinny-kid hardcore bombast to some of the Folly material, and claim a Big Black influence on their Thee Facebooks profile, so maybe that’s where it comes from. Balanced with the technicality and the throaty vocal shouts, it reminds my East Coast ears of earlier Dillinger Escape Plan at three-quarter speed toward the end of “Corn Eyes,” but the atmosphere in “Ship of Fools” and the slow build there is doomier and less frantic, speaking to a patience that hopefully Mongoloid Village will be able to develop going forward.

Cool tunes, felt like sharing, so here goes:

Tags: Mongoloid Village, Oregon, Portland, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 at 3:07 pm and is filed under On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.