Mr. Gnome – Madness in Miniature – Album Review

MP3: Mr. Gnome “Ate The Sun”

Imagine, if you will, languishing on a beach before an indifferent ocean, beneath an overcast sky, smoking cigarettes and perfecting your nihilist-chic posturing. Everyone went through that phase, right? Madness in Miniature, the forth-coming album from Mr. Gnome, starts off with ‘Ate the Sun’, a song begging you to revisit that very place. But only as vocalist/guitarist Nicole Barille begins to cry out ‘Ate the sun’ through the battered garage rock crescendo does one get the sense that this isn’t going to be another Beach-Boys-obsessed teenage effort with too many reverb pedals and too few after-school specials to attend to that are inundating the bandwidth these days. This is just one stop in their tour of rock n roll history somehow crammed into just under forty minutes.

The third full-length release from Barille and drummer/pianist Sam Meister, Madness feels at times to be in the midst of an identity crisis, jumping from simple, darling lilts to frenetic super-fuzz charges to the military-march of Crass (yes, I said it) all within the first single, ‘Bit of Tongue’; the awkward/cool of ‘House of Circles’ – ‘You can’t walk when I come over’ Barille quips – that gives way to the raucous guitar barrage, which in turn finally relents when the song slides into the following ‘Run For Cover’, a sound collage of vocal rounds and overdubs. These medleys are countered by the consistency of others on the album – ‘We Sing Electric’ is a solid 70’s rock song that would turn Black Mountain green with envy; ‘Winter’ tones it down somewhere in the middle – but even these stray far from each other in style and sound.

Two things hold it all together: the unrelenting pace – most songs bleed into the following track and occasionally have elements from the preceding ones – and the duo’s ability to rock in every way imaginable. From surf to psych, garage to arena, drone to noise (they are different, I swear), Mr. Gnome wants to cover it all, and mostly they manage it.

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