Blood Is Clean

VINYL FORMAT. Speck Mountain are back with a new single and a new energy. The warm, melancholic bath of "Hey Moon" and Summer Above has given way to a dirtier, more assertive, though equally mesmerizing sound. Starting with a Honey Owens (Valet) song from last year that Speck Mountain have turned up the rock quotient on significantly, courtesy of sax, an age's old bass mantra and Marie-Claire's barbed guitar attack, transplanted direct from the most severely dosed basement on earth. "Backslide" approaches the kind of wide-eyed gratification that electronica has promised in the past, but rarely delivered--with several degrees of treated organ pulsating around Karl's sweetly protracted guitar tease.