The sorta staggeringly productive Philadelphia duo Social Junk have released a number of cassettes, 12″s, and CDRs, but you’ll likely have the easiest time tracking down last year’s Concussion Summer LP on Not Not Fun and the more six-song, 48-minute collection, Born Into It. Heather Young and Noah Anthony are constant shape-shifters not easily pinned down to one style between releases, but this time out they’re burrowing into lo-fi wind-tunnel psychedelia layered with junkyard percussion, saxophone, tape loops, guitars, electronics, etc. It can be honed to a disarmingly peaceful, trance-y nocturnal rumble as on “Grieg” or the more propulsive (and sacred-seeming) opener, “It Just Isn’t The Same.” The work could be viewed as a darker side of this recent bedroom ambient-psych thing, but to try and pin their project to that wouldn’t be fair to a band who’s clearly working out of an older tradition: For one quick example, most of Born Into It would fit nicely on the essential 1996 comp Sidereal Rest, on which Paste, U.S. Saucer, Bugskull, Pork Queen, Caroliner Rainbow, Sun City Girls, Noggin, and others, tried singing us lullabies. So murky and so beautiful.
Born Into It is out via Digitalis. A split with Peaking Lights is forthcoming on Ecstatic Peace. You can research a number of other releases at their MySpace, where you’ll also find more sounds. (Make sure to listen to “All I See” and the aforementioned “Grief.”)
[Photo by Rhea Decaro]
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