The fifth album from this Chicago trio manages to create its own unique take on so-called psychedelic rock by clearly showing some influences that will give newcomers a familiar point to grab hold of while still taking them somewhere entirely new.
"Parts Are Lost," the midpoint of His/Hers is where some of these influences show through the clearest—an ambience not far removed from the first Velvet Underground album and the buried, gentle vocals and stripped-down guitar work of Perfect Prescription-era Spacemen 3—yet it stands on its own with its jazz type structural composition. Spreading out in either direction, the influences become more blurred and the sound more experimental. "Forced March" is amped-up with clipping guitar riffs that chug along at a glacial pace. The shoegaze blur continues until about half way through when someone cuts the power, yet the band plays on until the end, the track entering like a lion and ending like a lamb.
"Moss Man" is built around a basic guitar twang and a truckload of reverb. Extremely Spartan instrumentation-wise in its opening, it soon gains in intensity and ends with a blowout that would make any shoegaze band of the early 1990s proud. The remaining tracks stray closer to the calmer, mellow end of the spectrum: quiet and slow, yet never easily ignored.
Folky psych-rock is one of the "it" genres right now, and Zelienople manage to go beyond the simple acts of using acoustic guitars and heavy effects and create something that stands on its own. The intentionally slow pace exemplifies the concept that simplicity in sound is not a factor of how little an artist can do, but how much can be done with a smaller palette, and in this case it proves to be quite a bit. It is an album that definitely rewards the attentive listener.
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