Music, Record Reviews

New Record: Man In Gray, I Can’t Sleep Unless I Hear You Breathing

Posted by: Johnny Loftus on August 22, 2007 at 9:03 am

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“If You Ride It Till The End, You’ll Get What You Came For” isn’t just the opening track on Brooklyn combo Man In Gray’s first full length. It’s a dare, a foreshadowing statement on the spastic post-punk that’s still to come on the record. And for these guys, the cherry on top is clearly vocalist Tina DeCosta and her alternately graceful and gravely wail. I Can’t Sleep Unless I Hear You Breathing walks the line between jagged rock-n-roll and revivalist new wave by pairing its clean sounds with what is much more apparent, its clear chaos.

“Stranded” starts with straightforward, crisp guitars. But it builds darker as DeCosta hisses lines such as “Where can you go where people stay the same? It’s not an easy place. It isn’t anywhere.” “Fault Lines,” meanwhile, offers up its grating guitars at the onset, and DeCosta sneers and howls like a disciple of Karen O. Of course, she talks pretty the next, just to keep us on the balls of our heels. “Crawl” wanders on in weird sci-fi fashion for more than a minute before the song finds its fragile structure. Turns out it was just waiting to be bent and broken by Man in Gray guitarists Jeremy Joseph and Bryan Bruchman. It goes on like this. Dizzying, aching, and unpredictable, I Can’t Sleep continues to reveal one surprise after another. And that means something in a New York City indie scene that sometimes seems more predictable than what’s going on in the flyover states.

– Ava Dial

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