- At face value, Luke Wyatt's music and visual art have a kind of wink-and-a-grin quality—something you get from his new album's title, Let's Cry And Do Pushups At The Same Time. But underneath this wry humor, his Torn Hawk project has given us some of his most emotionally direct music. Combining live guitar with foggy, burnt-out synths and drum machine clatter, Torn Hawk's music straddles a kind of neon-fuzzed industrial kosmiche zone. At its best, his busted up jams sound somewhat like the blue-sky fantasias of Manuel Göttsching crossed with the slippery urban pastoralia of Durutti Column.
And shit does he stay busy. In addition to his work as a video artist, Wyatt's released three proper albums as Torn Hawk in the last year, along with a variety of splits, singles for L.I.E.S. and other weirdo outposts like No Pain In Pop, plus an album under his real name for Emotional Response. Let's Cry And Do Pushups At The Same Time is his second full-length this year, and his first for Mexican Summer. It offers intriguing details on close examination, but is also content to soundtrack your afternoon window-gazing. As such, it's another entry of his sublime wanderer's music as Torn Hawk, and includes some of his most arresting and sonically numbing creations to date.
Opener "I'm Flexible" blurs eight-bit bleeps and bloops around a gauzy, droning bit of synth that almost sounds like some of the fleecy, music-box electronica of an artist like Múm. The open-eyed romance of "Afterprom" brings his guitar playing to the fore, a plaintive workout that cascades around the track's central synth motif. Both "Return To The Pec Deck" and "She Happens" surround breezy synth lines with guitars that seem to sputter and spurt in a way that both soothes and quietly seethes. "Because Of M.A.S.K." allows charred, distorted bits of noise to scatter across more of Wyatt's astral guitar layering. As the record closes with the shoegaze-blare and noisy beauty of "There Was A Time," it becomes clear that, for all of the immediate surface attractions here, Wyatt's creations are beguiling and complex in ways that really reward attentive listening. So you return to the start, you put your headphones on, and watch you watch the year's first snow begin to fall.
Tracklist01. I'm Flexible
02. She Happens
03. Afterprom
04. Return To The Pec Deck
05. Acceptance Speech
06. Because Of M.A.S.K.
07. Under Wolf Rule
08. There Was A Time