Listen: Close To Me

Close To Me is sort of an anomaly. To locals, the Mid-South is a good decade or two in the past. The school system, economy, crime, public transportation…everything seems to be in total disarray and the general vibe is kind of a bummer at times. Imagine an even more southern Gummo ten years later and you’ll get a good idea of how weird Memphis is. It’s not hard to believe that there are bands still playing post-hardcore that sounds like it stepped out of a late-90s time warp created by Orchid, Saetia, Pg99, and many others. It sounds like these guys had a steady diet of nothing but post-rock since early high school, which could be dangerous territory for creating compelling music within a genre bloated with shitty same-sounding bands. But this might be why their 2010 demo works so well. Close To Me sings a croon at odds with themselves and with their surroundings, both physical and musical. There’s no free jazz, no post-acid dubstepping, no good-feeling beach reverb guitars, just pure hard-working gut and limited posturing. Their latest demo starts off with blurts of sparse amp noise, cramming in a good 30 seconds of silence to balance the sheer weight of the next 8ish minutes. It’s a refreshing listen, rotten, full of angst, and hopeless at best. Close To Me played their last show this past month, but you can still listen to (or download) their latest demo here.