The Boy With The Square Eyes

Melkbelly “Elk Mountain”

Melkbelly is remarkably fully formed for a band with only a couple singles out: a very defined guitar aesthetic; good melodies; a strong sense of urgency in everything they’ve produced. Guitar parts in Melkbelly songs are constantly moving – snaking around the beat, scraping against the groove, making hairpin turns just after you’ve settled into a rhythm. “Elk Mountain” does all of those things and more in four minutes, setting up a tension at odds with the vocal, which is basically a one-sided stoned conversation with some weirdo kid named Rusty. The details of the lyrics are surreal and unsettling, but sorta deadpan and matter-of-fact. By the end, she’s singing in this soft wordless angelic tone, and it’s hard to remember exactly how you got there because everything else went by in a blur.

Buy it from Bandcamp.