"Listening carefully to the patterns reveals the essence of music and explains why presidents get killed and why my grandmother goes to Florida every winter. Music is capable of understanding everything. It's a disruptive experience, it's a slow-motion compendium of everything that has ever happened to people."
Ian Williams, DON CABALLERO
The best instrumental noise band in the world. But the most astonishing fact is being able to affirm this with renewed certainty today, more than a decade after this milestone of contemporary music. "For Respect" is Don Caballero's debut work, and the systematic treatment of all their noisy universe. You can take thirty-seven minutes and forty-three seconds to digest this album. Or eleven long years, listening to one track at a time, for your birthday: and see what has changed, what you've set aside and what's on your mind for what's to come.
Math-rock, noise, and post-splintered hardcore: to define and label this very personal slice of sound would mean doing a disservice to the immeasurable brilliance of Don Caballero. After all, for those who play any instrument, the Cabs appear as the most exciting hybrid form between mathematical logic and instinctual drive that can be conceived in the phase of arrangement and composition; for those who listen to them, they are more simply something that has to do with the exploration of the unknown, the unexpected turns life takes. Urgency and abstraction, condensed into single parts of sound comprehensible only in their entirety, in the general architecture of 5 minutes and 53 seconds founded on new laws ("New Laws") of physics and statics. Like a subterranean river carving through the earth's gorges ("Rocco") to resurface from time to time or the aerial view of a moving body's movement ("Got a Mile, Got a Mile, Got an Inch"); bears that see things always better than they appear ("Bears See Things Pretty Much The Way They Are") and artificial engravings on elements of nature ("Nicked and Liqued"), mercury on a wooden thermometer. Don Caballero experiment with all the creative potential in the union of a bass, a drum, and two guitars, unleashing a thousand rhythmic notations and extraordinary intertwining strings that seem to multiply and reduce to infinity, following the irregular breath of the human.
"For Respect" is a very current and yet timeless album, the matrix of willingly unfinished music, a container that becomes harmonious and definitive only when it "makes sense" to the listener. A 360-degree view of the world, a sonic confrontation/clash with one's perception of external and internal reality: how many other albums in your boundless discography could you say the same about? So if you don't already have it, buy it; listen to it in any way and make copies to gift around, happy with a discovery that you absolutely must share and in the awareness of a musical experience that exhausts and satisfies anyone with good sense. Like a new point of arrival, a new realization. Like all things that make a man better.
"We Built Road": it's up to us to build the road we choose to walk.
Tracklist and Videos
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