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Eisenhower Field Day
Let's Not Tell Lies
Lesser Note Records
2006
www.eisenhowerfieldday.com

Sounding unabashedly similar to vintage Superchunk and never embarrassed for it, Indianapolis’ Eisenhower Field Day swerves and sweats and voraciously emits pure indie rock carnage. Sure the guitars sound stuck in 1995 and the melodies feel slightly used, but Let’s Not Tell Lies plays like some beatific thrift shop discovery, some monumental unearthing at the record shop cut-out bin.

“National Sunday Law” is a bouncing gem of basement-show wizardry, while delinquent melodies and fuzzbomb distortion make for a stellar cut. And the wave-crush wall-of-guitar opening on “The Backs of My Arms” is pure indie bliss. The wonderfully muted and subdued lyrics, always just barely out of reach, allow the listener to interpret and enforce whatever true meaning they like, giving Eisenhower Field Day an everyman (and woman thanks to Holly Butler’s beautifully subdued harmonies and duel melodics) reliability.

The slow-chug demolition of “Conversation Lows” brilliantly leads into the peppy diffusion of garage band sprawl and choked back, fumbling-love verses of “Two Pockets.”

The addition of the band’s Our Time in the Colonies EP to the disc lends the entire endeavor a slightly homogenizing effect, but allows for the inclusion of the love-crush battlefield melancholia of “Don’t Throw Away” and a funky-short instrumental called “Driving to China.” By the time EFD drifts in and out of the boy-girl singalong of “In Our Shoes,” any casual listener will be earnestly yearning for the golden days of self-distributed indie rock.

Favorite Track: Track 4, "The Backs of My Arms”

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Christopher j Ewing is a writer and filmmaker living in San Francisco with a girl and a designer dog (Chihuahua vs. dachshund). He is in a band by himself and has a myspace account (www.myspace.com/slapbraceletskill) and a production company (www.wastepot.com) for freelance film and crit/journo work.

 
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