The Get Hustle, Rollin’ in the Ruins

The Get Hustle’s promo sheet claims that the band has “consistently made albums that amaze.” For once, a publicist’s overblown claims might not have been hyperbole, but for the substitution of one word: though the Get Hustle’s music, as on Rollin’ in the Ruins, is certainly remarkable, it is less amazing than…disturbing. Like kindred spirits Japanther, but less playfully, the Get Hustle retain a sense of the danger of rock music that is almost anachronistic. Though the band has existed for nine years, and toured for nearly that many, it displays none of the leanness or precision of a veteran outfit. Drummer Maximillion Avila plays his double-kick pedal like he bought it yesterday, though that can’t be the case since his drums sound as if they haven’t been tuned in years. Organist Mac Mann fares a bit better, if only because his parts are so strange that it is difficult to say what it would even mean to play them accurately. Singer Valentine Falcon, for his part, would sound like he was simply imitating the Blood Brothers’ Johnny Whitney if not for a powerful sense of creepiness that, in a way, outdoes even the Brothers’ piercing menace. The sum of these parts is an opaque mess, a slurry of thumping, pounding, whining, screeching noise that commands attention like hot lava. Ruins‘s closer, an untitled fourteen-minute dirge, embodies the dread and livid paranoia of the Get Hustle majestically, as Avila and Mann maintain a throbbing loop that fades in and out under Falcon’s schizophrenic rant about the “Revolution Man” and the “yellow van right outside my door.” Its oppressive horror recalls Drive Like Jehu’s most frighteningly anarchic moments, but in a milieu that, while a bit less listenable, is perhaps more appropriate.