Big Spider’s Back – Warped
There is such a thing as a good 6/10 review and this is it. Electronic artist Yair Rubinstein is Big Spider’s Back and has acquired admirers in Seattle’s DIY community since taking his bedroom recording project out into the open with this debut EP.
With mumbling samples, loops and creaking vocal, his lo-fi and poppish psychedelia veers between synthesized peaks and, sadly, inconsequential ambience. It hasn’t the levels of blissed out trance that artists like Washed Out are achieving and it misses the tropical weirdness of recent success stories Neon Indian and Banjo Or Freakout.
What it does possess is a killer tune in the form of the title track. Already beloved by the influential KEXP radio station and podcast, it starts resolutely in Animal Collective country with shimmering harmonies and dappled loops and never really deviates from thereon in. It’s preceded by the appealing “Perfect Machine”, which opens with repetitive and acoustic strumming before devolving into summery birdsong and wide-eyed samples. Rubinstein’s mid-pitched vocal here loops into ever more ebbing and flowing ambience.
These high-water marks are disappointingly let down by the sub-Panda Bear bubbles and tangents of “Again, Agent”, a track that seems nothing more than an exercise in shoulder shrugging. In better hands “Spooked” could have been as creepy as its title deserves, meandering and popping as Ducktail’s self-titled offering did, but in its current format lands forlornly on the wrong side of pretentious noise experiment.
Pride is happily restored with the promising “Don’t Make Me Laugh”. Its slow tempo is beset with electronic twinkling and the reappearance of Rubinstein’s drifting and diaphanous vocal. The queue to grab Noah Lennox’s coattails starts here it would appear.