La Snacks, Newfangled

There’s a lot to like on La Snacks’ Newfangled EP, with all its throwback-ness to my own personal indie-rock heyday, when Pavement was great, The Pixies and Sebadoh were gods, and Spoon weren’t famous yet. It’s got a great, fuck-it-all looseness to it, oozing so much Malkmusian laidback ease that the sound at times threatens to knock you unconscious. The guitars are totally ’90s-esque, dirty-but-not-grimy and unlayered as hell, with just one guitar switching back and forth between crunching chords and quasi-tonal Black Francis lines (the band’s apparently a five-piece, by the way, but I’ve got no clue why they need all those people, since they sound like a power trio). Plus, the band originally hails from sister city Beaumont, which always makes me puff up with Southeast Texan pride.

And lyrically, while a few of the lines are clunkers, even those somehow stick; I cringe every time Robert Segovia gets to the “I’ll be your Neville Chamberlain / You can have my Sudetenland” line in opener “Kristin Was A Meteorologist,” but I’ll be damned if I don’t catch myself muttering it under my breath half a dozen times a day. The rhythms shamble and stumble, meandering along heavy-lidded, like you just stumbled on the band jamming in their practice space and they really don’t care if you’re watching; see the Spoon-meets-Weezer ramble of “Devil Has Left the Building” for proof.

Then there’s “Jackson 88,” both the literal midpoint and high point of the album, all triumphant and addictive, with a beautiful, New Pornographers-esque cascading guitar line and some bitter, ambiguous lyrics about family (love the “I was raised by loudmouths” bit) and childhood. I can’t figure out how Segovia gets from a Jesse Jackson t-shirt on a sidewalk in 1979 to Jackson’s actual political runs in ’84 and ’88, but hell, I don’t mind. It’s a brilliant little burst of indie-rock glory, one seemingly tailor-made for a mixtape you give your closest friends.