Enablers | Some Gift
(Wrong Speed Records)
Although ostensibly still based in San Francisco, where they were founded in 2002, innovative experimental underground band Enablers features a recent Hudson Valley transplant in its ranks: guitarist Kevin Thomson, who relocated to Kingston a couple of years back (the former member of Timco, Nice Strong Arm, and other projects also performs under the name Hazel Atlas). Some Gift is the group’s seventh album and, much like their earlier work, is a heady, hypnotic, and frequently heavy trip that finds the effects-drenched instruments of Thomson (who doubles on lap steel) and fellow guitar man Joe Goldring (Swans, Toiling Midgets) weaving watery atmospherics around the spoken wordage of poet and frontman Pete Simonelli. Tracks like “Phone Blows Up,” “Suburban Death March,” and “Willard to Kurtz” channel Jim Thompson and Jim Morrison meeting up on a dark postpunk trip—one very much worth taking. Acolytes of Slint or Protomartyr, dig in.
This article appears in October 2023.
