Reversing Falls

It’s no secret that the noise collages of the 90's are back in style when it comes to today’s young artists. Big hooks, noise and volume have pushed rootsy melodies, steel guitar and layered seven-part harmonies to the back burner. Unfortunately, for most of those artists trying to sound like their influences, the genius of bands like Guided By Voices and Pavement was delivered by the lo-fi aesthetic, not created as a result of it.



Thankfully, when Montreal’s Reversing Falls enters the studio, a finer understanding and appreciation of sound drives the end results. For Tyler Crawford – who is also a sound engineer that has worked with Parlovr and Cotton Mouth – the two-minute blasts of noise and guitar might sound gritty and raw, but the songs are well thought out and sound great in your headphones. Just take a quick listen to the crunch of the guitar on the sing-along ready “Still Kicking” and you can hear how Reversing Falls fuses noise and layers into the mix, but never hides their pop .



I have no idea how this band sounds like New Brunswick and don’t think their universal power punk, yelpy indie can be pigeonholed into some mythical, catch-all East Coast sound, but I do know that Recoder takes some of the most enjoyable touch points from the people that started the indie movement and manages to put them through a unique, personal filter to power the songs through the grit and stand out from the countless bands trying to follow the same path. - Herohill

“Distorted guitar pop made for short attention spans” is the way Reversing Falls describes their sound. The Montreal band worked with producer Martin Horn (Parlovr, Nightwood, Cotton Mouth) and mixer Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire, Owen Pallett, Land of Talk) on their EP, Recoder, released late last year. The band are playing Montreal’s Casa del Popolo tomorrow night for those of you there looking for something to do.

There’s definitely a sense of controlled chaos to this collection of songs, and that’s one thing that sets Reversing Falls apart from other noise-pop upstarts that have cropped up over the last little while. What I realized pretty quickly is that each sound on these songs serves a purpose; it’s not there just as sound filler but it helps move the song forward, or gives it a new layer of dynamism. So often I hear similar sounding bands that just drown their songs in feedback and filler, obliterating any traces of songwriting that may have been present. It’s not so with Reversing Falls; though it may not be instantly apparent, there’s craftsmanship and real writing happening to these songs. I’d be keeping an eye out for more from them in 2011, if I were you. - Quick Before it Melts

Nearly 25 years after the fact, Montreal comes up with a satisfactory answer to raucous Chicago post-punks Big Black, and it's ballsy, bootstrapping noise-pop trio Reversing Falls. On this debut four-track attack, the threesome armour up the guitars and go bombing through tunes that seem on the precipice of spinning out of control, but which somehow always manage to crash back in around their simple, central songwriting ideas. If there's one quibble, it's that all four compositions seem tailored for an ADD dance floor - there are some great songs that need more than the average two-minute outlet they're given here. Patience is a virtue that rocks. - The Hour