Remember the Night Parties
Hectic without being fast, Oxford Collapse's third album further enshrines the Brooklyn band's ramshackle ethos, favoring tweaked time signatures and jangly guitars over anything intentionally linear. Witness the crumbling percussion midway in "Return of /  Burno," how it pulls the floor from the song, sending Michael Pace's guitar and Adam Rizer's bass into a call-and-response of feedback and melody restatements while the drums gradually rebuild the tune. It's a heart thing, Dan Fetherston's drums: they pump the blood on these 11 songs evenly and then with an arrhythmia, as if Pavement found their way to Brooklyn via Athens, Georgia. That's a stellar route, by the way, to a fine album.--Andrew Bartlett