Album Details

• Artist: The Megaphonic Thrift
• Album: The Megaphonic Thrift
• Label: Club AC30
• Year of Release: 2012
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2012-02-26

With one full-length, and EP and ton of stage time behind them, Norwegian quartet The Megaphonic Thrift is ready to conquer. This eponymous release is a solid slab of noise, pop and shoegaze that is energetic and consistently rocking. This is a genre that is either easily guilty of pretension or which tries to cover shitty ideas with sheets of noise. But The Megaphonic Thrift does neither, remaining smart, inspiured and deadly throughout.

"Tune Your Mind" and "Raising Flags" lead things off with brain-frying distortion and fast, snotty, but with some pop touches, respectively.
"Fire Walk With Everyone" is pulsating, bass and minor-chord driven shoegaze with a memorable groove; if this was the 80s, a video of this would be on MTV all day long. "Over the Mountain, Down" is a massive and epic a pop-noise tune, another of their songs that would be a classic hit in another era.

Other tracks of note include "Moonstruck," a majestic and sheer mix of melody and noise, "I Wanted To Know," a Velvets-y slow, jaded, mostly acoustic monotone anti-love song with sound effects, and the abstract  "Kill, Breathe and Frown."

"Space Out" makes for an odd closer, a kind of a murky, distant tune, well-titled, though. Better would have been "The Guillotine," with its massive and taunting riff, ala "Repo Man" era Iggy. Still, this is a minor complaint. The Megaphonic Thrift, both band and record, are cocky enough to display their ample talents with abandon, but refined enough to win hearts while doing it.

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