Mark McGee, formerly of To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie, has partnered up with a new female vocalist, Nicole Tollefson, to follow the path he pioneered in his previous band, combining harsh, noisy electronics and guitar with pure, delicate female vocals to excellent effect, although it seems that the harsher end of the spectrum has been reigned in somewhat.
Where TKAPB would drift into especially raw electronic territory, McGee keeps that in check here, but never becoming too dull or predictable.The sparse, messy backing and over-driven bass thud of "Ocean" is by no means serene, especially paired with Tollefson's delicate, high pitched vocals.The wordless opening vocals of "We Give and Give and You Take and Take and Take and Take" and distant percussion are especially airy, even if it is mucked up brilliantly with scattershot, industrial tinged rhythms as the piece goes on.
On "Teratoma" and "Don't Be Mad at Me," a bit of McGee's harsher edge comes out, the former initially propelled by junky percussion, but then throws out a good helping of distorted noise outbursts, balancing between chaos and purity before allowing the noise to win at the end.The latter is the longest track here, and uses the extended duration to build jerky rhythms and dramatic vocals from an initially textural undercurrent.Here especially the juxtaposition of ugly and beautiful is the most obvious.
The short "Lungs" is mostly Tollefson's voice, layered and looped into a hazy piece of abstraction that is comparatively more stripped down and simple compared to the other songs on here.The closing "Edmund" goes in a different direction, keeping the up-front voices but bringing in identifiable guitar and almost jazz-laden drums, but still throws in a few outbursts of vacuum cleaner noise.
At six tracks and a little under a half-hour, it's hard to see how Father You See Queen with stand up next to To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie, especially since there are some notable similarities between the two projects.However, those similarities include McGee's brilliant balancing of dissonant noise and delicate, beautiful vocals, so they’re definitely on the right track.
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