Odonis Odonis share new track+video “Angus Mountain,” announce SXSW shows

If Hard Boiled Soft Boiled, the latest full-length from Canada’s Odonis Odonis (out April 15 on Buzz Records), is very much an album of two halves – part belligerent noise rock and part industrial-tinged daydreamer balladry – “Angus Mountain” might just be the perfect meeting point of the two.

Dominated by towering hooks and scattershot beats, the track achieves its catharsis not through pummeling you in a contest of who can shout the loudest, but by lifting you skywards in torrential transcendence. In the process it calls to mind both the affecting textural play of vintage Cocteau Twins and nods towards Wire, Ministry and These Arms Are Snakes in its razor-sharp guitar lines and ear-catching intensity. Stream the track on Noisey or over at SoundCloud.

The track’s accompanying video (directed by Jesse Yules) perfectly recreates this dichotomy at the heart of ‘Angus Mountain’. Finding itself halfway between the sort of kaleidoscopic visuals you might expect from a band who tag themselves as ‘industrial surf-gazers’ and a children’s game of cootie catcher, it’s an on-the-money reflection of the group’s trippier tendencies and their willful melodic simplicity. Stream the video over at Stereogum.

The band is set to play this year’s SXSW music festival in Austin. Full tour dates listed below.

Tour Dates: 

Bio:

Born out the same Toronto DIY scene that spawned Metz/Soupcans/HSY/Greys, Odonis Odonis cut their teeth at the now defunct Buzz Garage, where they built a solid foundation as a crushing live band.

Onstage, Tzenos (vocals, guitar) is flanked by Denholm Whale (bass) and Jarod Gibson (drums). The live show is the point where their diverging influences and hypnotic visual aesthetic collide.

2011’s Hollandaze showcased the band’s ability to create something that was uniquely theirs out of a patchwork of influences as disparate as surf, industrial and old b-movie horror films. No one label fit, so “industrial surf-gaze” was coined.

The group returned in 2013 with their Better EP, upping the intensity of their frantic post-punk by focusing in on their talent for tuneful abrasion.

Hard Boiled Soft Boiled finds Odonis Odonis pushing their sound into new territory, because much like the hypnotic spiral that came to be associated with the band’s debut recordHollandaze, Odonis Odonis do not follow a linear path.

Label: 

Buzz Records was founded in 2011 as a garage venue that hosted mostly local punk and noise bands, and soon grew into a cross-genre hub of local and touring acts like White Lung, Doldrums, Mood Rings, and Odonis Odonis. Since the demise of the venue in late 2012, the Buzz crew of Ian Chai, Dean Tzenos, and venue co-founders Denholm Whale and Jude have been dedicated to releasing music that has come out of this small, dirty pocket of Toronto. Buzz has recently released music by Weaves, Odonis Odonis and HSY.