Silence the phone, draw the blinds and zone out to some experimental rock delights.
Buried beneath a wave of similarly titled “quirky” math and post-rock bands, Giraffes? Giraffes! deserve retrospective analysis for they accomplishing the difficult task of being head-bangingly fun and rejecting self-awareness, despite inhabiting such a stone-faced genre.
Beginning with the release of Superbass!!! In 2005, it was evident G! G?‘s strengths lay in disciplined execution: combining ear catching, Ritalin-embedded guitar with technically masterful drumming. Never a band to rely on single riffs to carry the tunes, you can find a plethora of different pathways and musical ideas within a single song. Take for example ‘Ko-Ink-E-Dink? I Think Not’, which traverses at least three different ranges of sound, all of them uniquely enjoyable and never disjointed or awkwardly out of place.
2007’s More Skin With Milk-Mouth brought a more refined approach, with cleaner production than that of Superbass!!!. The core elements remained the same, though the songs became bolder, longer and borrowed more elements of post-rock to complement the spazzed sounds of its predecessor.
‘I am s/h(im)e[r] as you am s/h(im)e{r} as you’ is as much a clusterfuck of ideas and sounds as the name suggests. Therein lies the beauty of a band like Giraffes! Giraffes? — beginning with a typically energetic opening of octopi drumming and twelve-fingered guitar tapping it gives way to a gorgeous middle section. Twelve-fingered guitar tapping gives way to a gorgeous middle section of meditative xylophone and distantly echoed tremolo. Although “quieter” moments like these exist on albums the world over, very few can pack the dynamic punch that follows in the interlude’s wake when the song goes from dreamlike lullaby to rousing defiance in mere moments, as ascending guitar stabs expertly mingle amongst blindingly precise drum fills.
2011’s Pink Magick saw the band dipping their toes in liquid LSD. Neither romanticizing or admonishing, Pink Magick presents terrifyingly surreal lows in ‘Werewolf Grandma With Knives (Part One: The Changeling)’ and substance-induced highs with ‘Transparent Man/Invisibly Woman (80,000,000 Years Alone)’.
Though the real reason to enjoy Giraffes? Giraffes! largely remains the same, as seen on all time classic ‘DRGNFKR’. Somebody needs to award these guys some sort of honorary award of excellence in the field of making music so damn enjoyable.
