God Bows to Math - Self-Titled
Yep, that would be a Minutemen reference you see there, however that’s pretty much where that homage stops. God Bows to Math are an Auckland, New Zealand based group that I first noticed with their EP from earlier last year and enjoyed enough to throw on a podcast. Didn’t realize an album was already in the plans, but as it turns out they’ve been trying to get this thing together for awhile now with a number of hangups along the way and finally getting it released towards the end of 2011.
The band is often advertised as something vaguely mathy, but really I don’t hear that, which is sort of surprising considering all the other areas they do lightly touch upon. Although with a song title like “Details on How to get DONCAB on Your License Plate”, you’d be led to believe otherwise. Also, I laughed a bit at that title. On this debut, God Bows to Math do tread somewhat into noisier territory at times when they feel compelled to with a guitar tone and riff largeness that kind of mimics the now sadly defunct Part Chimp. They however interject these aggressions with post-rock inspired instrumentals throughout the album that thankfully do not also include the characteristically long track lengths, which in turn makes for some decent transitions from track to track. Like fellow New Zealand peers Die! Die! Die!, the band isn’t afraid to adopt heavier pop leanings to allow their songs to be a bit more catchy, which I had not initially expected from them. Although, I wouldn’t quite say it’s to the extent of the aforementioned Die! Die! Die!, but as someone who went into this record looking for it to be more of a straight presentation of slightly noisier rock; it’s in fact turned out to be a much more varied record than I anticipated and largely in a good way. While I’ll never know if that’s more to do with the lengthy period of time it took to record it or just a natural growth as a band, either way the results turned out pretty good.
God Bows to Math – Blues for the Blind (stream)
Anyone that is interested in picking this up can do so by simply hitting up the groups Bandcamp page where they have it available on CD or digitally.
