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In my head I have this recurring vision of the music hype machine's grand architect: coolly slouching in his chair, with the most ironic mustache you've never seen and jeans so skinny they trap the leg hair in place, he stoically gazes upon a panorama of screens that directly transmit every band practice, every backspace party, and every nascent scene into his all-seeing wayfarers. With knowing and careful discretion (an early demo leak to Pitchfork here, an unsigned band's Myspace to Brooklyn Vegan there), the architect single-handedly baits and shepherds the more hep masses towards the next big thing. . . .
There's only one flaw* with my imaginary uber-hipster, however: no matter how current he gets, he is still merely a man, and as such his capacity is limited; even he misses things every now and then.
Enter Maps & Atlases, a Chicago band that, for the purposes of this metaphor, are one friggin' huge mistake. They've been slept on in a major way.
Shiraz Dada, Chris Hainey, Dave Davison, and Erin Elders are former art-school friends who boast the kind of technical prowess to put even the most accomplished Guitar Hero-virtuoso to shame. Together, as Maps & Atlases, the quartet makes tightly-coiled art-pop songs that fall somewhere between arithmetic and organism; what you might call math-rock with feelings. A tag-team of electric guitars (Davison and Elders) twitch and sputter, acute zigzags of melody streaking across each track, tethered only by the frenetic cues of Hainey's sometimes explosive, sometimes morse-code-subtle percussion. Davison's warbling and earnest vocals sound like the long-lost lovechild of Chad VanGaalen and Kyle Field (of Little Wings' fame), while Dada's bass acrobatics underpin all the action. The band 's songs are structured in looping, almost nursery rhyme-like rounds, which lend the markedly calculated tunes a wonderful sense of organic accumulative power.
The band has only two official releases to date, both on Sargent House records. The technically-dizzying Trees, Swallows, Houses (2006), followed by the more sedated wizardry of the much-too-short Me, You, and the Mountain (2008). Don't sleep on these dudes by checking out the freeload tracks and further listen-inks listed below, then buy some of their records!
*This is utterly false, of course, but don't be a whiny mofo and undercut my imagery.
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