The Sacred Bones Recording Concern has endeavored to release anything grimy, seemingly recorded in a dungeon and sounding like it. Despite that approach becoming the rough modus operandi for a slew of imprints today, the folks behind Sacred Bones apparently have a bit more of a tempered palette than most.
Granted, acts like Zola Jesus and…well mostly just Zola Jesus, work to redefine how obnoxious and boring a music can be simultaneously, the rest of Bones’ roster is shockingly strong in the most underground sense possible. Part of what makes the assemblage of talent so enthralling is that it’s not city specific. And really while most of the acts working with Sacred Bones would describe its music as somehow tied to garage, punk or psych, there’s not too much of an aural through line.
Issuing works from groups as diverse as Moon Duo and Nerve City – two perennial favorites – should aptly display the imprint’s desire to work in interesting musics as opposed to remaining within genre boundaries. Again, though, that’s not the point. Whoever’s behind the curtain just seems to be a fan of decent-to-good music and wants to spread it around. Working with vinyl at this point in time might assure folks of selling out of whatever run gets pressed, but there’s still not going to be a grand pay day at the end of a work week.
Nice Face, which might not be as familiar to folks as those aforementioned bands, ties itself more to a robotic seventy’s conception of punk than anyone else on Sacred Bones. But it’s a good balance – kinda like the Cripples, if anyone remembers that group, but with a bit more emphasis on rhythm.
Beginning as a home recording project, Nice Face, on its earliest releases, didn’t quite have the same, simple melodic penchant as demonstrated over the course of Immer Etwas. Tacked onto the end of the album’s proper tracking, those singles represent a look backwards as the Screamers are invoked on the poorly titled “FUBAR Over You.” And while that influence hadn’t dissipated by the time a full band recorded the long player, it’s toned down a bit.
Even with that adjustment, Immer Etwas doesn’t revel in updated tones. Pervasive throughout its discography, there’s as much Iggy Pop posturing as anything else. But that’s just simple rock stuffs, right? What makes Nice Face more interesting than whoever else bought Raw Power when they were sixteen is the fact that the group can switch back and forth between keyboard centered fair and that more traditional rock stuff. It’d be difficult to figure Nice Face as Dow Jones and the Industrials’ heir, but there’ve got to be a few folks that believe that.
Any number of other in-the-know references aren’t going to make Immer Etwas better or worse. But the disc does come at a time when it’d be very easy to dismiss work in this vein. Again, intangible as ever, Nice Face conjures a robot racket in punk terms and does it well enough not to sound tied to current concepts of the genre(s).