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I Must Have-Shake That American Ass

imusthaveBand Name: I Must Have
Album Name: Shake That American Ass
Best element: All-genre incorporation, and spazz-out goodness.
Genre: Spaz-rock
Website: www.imusthave.com
Label name: N/a
Band e-mail: ilikethewayyoutalk@hotmail.com

I have a soft spot for three types of music: well-done acoustic indie-pop (Sunset Alliance’s The Novi Split), post-hardcore (Tooth and Nail’s MewithoutYou), and spaz-rock (Saddle Creek’s Beep Beep). I Must Have falls squarely in the genre of spaz-rock, and they don’t make any bones about it.

Yes, their art is spazzy, their lyrics are spazzy, their titles are spazzy, every single thing is on the verge of crazy, but not quite. This is best shown in the first track “Party Disarray” (I love it when people set out a mission statement in the first track- it’s just good album planning), where the dour vocals belt out, “You comb your hair and you drink some wine! You kill her and you thrill her!” Later on in the song he screams that sounds like a cross between Jack White and and a real scream. It’s crazy. And that’s just vocally.

Prone to rock, but also prone to random spurts of jamming, minimalist sections that prey on silence, technical math rock explosions, and to stop/start fits of spasm, this rock is so precisely written that I can’t imagine the amount of time that must have gone into this. To make all this chaos scripted for tape must have taken the utmost patience and care. The back-and-forth punch of “Robotic Harvest”, the demented drumming and stellar bass line in “Complexity in the End”, and the manic, panicked crowning achievement of the album: “Good Nights”. The song rips from all out rock to indie-rock lullaby to stomping rock to precise twists of songwriting and back…it simply defies logic. It’s awesome.

I Must Have disables the barriers of music. They incorporate everything into their spazziness, and if you like experimentation, hard music, indie rock, or like to be punched in the face, you should definitely Shake That American Ass with I Must Have.

-Stephen Carradini

independentclauses@hotmail.com