Font – Strange Burden LP

Black vinyl. It's tempting to intellectualize Font, the Austin-based quintet whose driving music of sampled stabs, dance beats, and euphoric choruses could be labeled with all manner of hyphenated pseudo-genres ("art-rock," "dance-punk," "noise-pop"). However, their music quickly makes clear the inadequacy of those kinds of labels. As drummers Jack Owens and Logan Wagner lock into a co-constructed groove, Roman Parnell's bass bridges the kinetic back line to multi-instrumentalist and environment-shaper Anthony Laurence. From this density emerge frontman Thom Waddill's associative lyrics and electric-shock dance. Font's debut album Strange Burden shows the band both translating the intensity of their live shows into the studio and polishing the surfaces of their music to juxtapose and dislocate genres with a quick-footed, nearly pop-art sensibility. Patchworked over years of improvising, playing, recording and re-recording both in studios and at home, Strange Burden is the fever-dream document of Font's nascent stage. It careens from precipice to precipice, revelation to revelation; over the course of a lean 28 minutes, the record covers a dizzying amount of ground. It draws from the past - New Wave, No Wave, rock, punk, pop - but rejects nostalgia, relentlessly pushing their influences into the future.