Sightings

On the surface, New York’s Sightings—guitarist/ vocalist Mark Morgan, drummer John Lockie, and bassist Richard Hoffman—would seem like your typical trio. One listen to any of their albums, though, would dissuade you of that notion. Though Sightings uses traditional rock instrumentation, the sounds that they coax from those instruments are anything but traditional. Over the course of seven full-length albums, Morgan and friends have taken the lessons learned from both their no-wave forefathers—DNA, Glenn Branca—and noise-mongering peers—Wolf Eyes, Lightning Bolt—and apply them to musical constructs that don’t “rock ’n’ roll” so much as they simmer and seethe.

Their newest album for Jagjaguwar imprint Brah, City of Straw, possibly finds the trio at their most approachable, but that’s just a matter of degrees. The sounds on this album seem like they originate from malfunctioning electrical appliances, not honest-to-goodness instruments. The rhythms that form within these masses of sound have more to do with the punishing cacophony of industrial assembly lines that anything remotely groove-oriented. And as these circuits spark and flash, and the pistons pound, Morgan sing-speaks over the top of this racket like a person that learned English from listening to Jesus Lizard records through a concrete wall. It’s the sort of music that’s not exactly musical. For those tuned into Sightings’ off-kilter frequencies, or for those willing to let it work its black magic, however, Sightings is no less than manna from heaven. —David Raposa