Zak Sally / Zak Sally's Fear of Song
Artist Zak Sally
Album Title: Zak Sally's Fear of Song
Album Cover:
Primary Genre Alternative & Punk: General Alternative
Format CD
Released 00/00/2009
Label Lamano 21
Catalog No LM006
Bar Code No 432000007892
Packaging Hand Made
Tracks
1. St(R)Utter (5:23)
(Zak Sally)
2. Why We Hide (2:59)
(Zak Sally)
3. How I Did What I Did When I Did it (4:18)
(Zak Sally)
4. My Secret World (4:06)
(Zak Sally)
5. 5th of July (3:34)
(Zak Sally)
6. T.D.T.S. (5:03)
(Zak Sally)
7. Grow Feathers (4:47)
(Zak Sally)
8. Fear of Song (2:05)
(Zak Sally)
9. Corpsegrinder! (4:52)
(Zak Sally)
Date Acquired 07/06/2010
Personal Rating
Acquired from Electric Fetus - Duluth
Purchase Price 11.69
Reviews
Pitchfork - 6.0

Zak Sally's got plenty of creative outlets: Besides claiming membership in Duluth's Enemymine, he's also an accomplished comic artist on the La Mano Press imprint and can even claim an IMDB page thanks to a cameo in Shopgirl. But I'm guessing that most Pitchfork readers know Sally as the former bassist of Low, which should go a long way towards explaining why such extracurricular interests are understandable, if not damn near necessary-- can't be easy to let loose when you're in a trio that's synonymous with slowcore and whose other two members are married to each other.

So, here we have his self-released solo bow, Zak Sally Presents Fear of Song, financed in part by Sally's eBay sales of Low album art. Though Fear of Song doesn't go anywhere near as avant-garde as its title might suggest, it does make me feel like transposing a Jay-Z ad-lib in saying that it's from the real garage, not the "garage" garage. Fear of Song is wires-exposed and seams-showing, with an immediacy that pleasantly suggests the lot of it was freshly mastered about five minutes before it got put on disc. In fact, it's worth seeing Fear as what got skimmed from The Great Destroyer on the way to the frighteningly austere Drums and Guns.

Fear of Song is almost equally split between waltz-timed but aggressively strummed acoustics and distortion. "Why We Hide" recalls Low's "California" given a lo-fi makeover with Sally's everydude voice (think Phoenix's Thomas Mars subbing angst for ennui) fighting for air amongst bleating organ and handclaps. The guitars of "St(r)utter" shriek with teeth-grinding treble while the mix is defaced with streaks of noise, and on the opposite end, "How I Did What I Did When I Did It" humidifies Johnny Marr-styled ringing chords with sticky reverb. The tension peaks in "My Secret World", kept stationary by Sally's laconic sneer and a wishlist of lyrics delivered via the urgency of Violent Femmes' "Add It Up".

But if Fear Of Song is a little misleading in terms of Sally's artistic intentions, the worst you can say about it is that it tips to a sense of self-centeredness that leads to the record's weakest moments-- "5th of July" rides a listless post-grunge chord slide into the post-grunge self-pity of "T.D.T.F." ("I'll hobble on my fucking crutch"), whose easy rhymes counteract any sort of payoff its cataclysmic blowout of distortion offers. It satisfies musically at an uneven rate, but Sally's a busy guy-- maybe it's just a pit stop on the way to something more fully fleshed, or maybe it's just something that was a weekend's worth of closet cleaning that serves as its own satisfying end. If it's the former, embracing and facing his Fear would well be-advised.

— Ian Cohen, August 12, 2009

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13364-fear-of-song/
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