Inspector 34 - Love My Life LP

Love My Life is the latest full-length album from Lowell MA's Inspector 34. With their Don't Worry This Is OK EP (SMC 004EP), Inspector 34 showed a wild capability to make a simple rock song big and boisterous, but Love My Life cracks the whole chestnut open, creating a gigantic universe to crawl inside and lie in. With a wide embrace of sound, the 13 songs on Love My Life emit faint whiffs from all types of American budget lo-fi records of the past 30 or so years, from Guided by Voices to U.S. Maple. And it's the variety that grabs you -- starting with the tripped out "Love" intro moving into the staggered groove of "Everybody," ribbed with delicate fuzz and a fizzy electronic exoskeleton somehow reminiscent of Animal Collective's Centipede Hz, the album ends with the mushing Akron/Family groove that boils over on "Ride the River of Light." In between, there's the sizzle of a "Thick Bologna" slice hitting your buttered frying pan in the cold morning before you lay it down on your morning biscuit, oozing out grease like the great Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919 -- it settles in your guts, a perfectly honed and stoned rocking chair groove. "My" slips in shortly after and wedges itself in between your brain and your mind as a solidified, rock tumor metastasizing the same way a Surfer Rosa joint would, clocking in at under a minute-and-a-half. "Grow Old" is a glacial grower, adding elements like ticking guitar parts, choral vocals, and guttural grime. It's a jungle of solid guitar motifs laced with a Sgt. Peppers kaleidoscopic wonderment similar to Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle. This is junk rock, sludge pop, indie rock for the apocalypse. Influences pop out sharply at times, but dissolve quickly; one minute you think you're in the bridge of an OK Computer B-side, the next you're submerged in a simmering fuzz tunnel with a set of limber guitar chords that titillate like no other this side of the Mississippi. Inspector knows their sound oozes from the space and lulling strums, never too bogged down, but wildly intricate like waves of sonic mercury. Love My Life is a noisy odyssey through a quantum field with mellowing currents of fuzz, coalescing into warm, phosphorescent pockets of self-portraiture.