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Uncut
Modern Currencies
Paper Bag Records
There’s something massive and dark, something heaving and foreboding that lurks throughout the songs that make up Uncut’s sophomore disc Modern Currencies.
Oddly enough, this something presides over the album with such predatory menace, it doesn’t even seem to be coming from the music itself. Musically un-nameable, it functions more as an implication, or a threat, which is way heavier than the real thing, because we all know that as soon as you can name something you can begin to reduce it, to subtract from it until it ceases to be anything. But if you can’t name it, then it just gets bigger and bigger. You see my point. And that’s how it is with this Toronto outfit—their songs just keep expanding with such sonic intensity that with each successive listen they rise to unimaginable minacious heights. Oddly enough, this is not to suggest that Modern Currencies is loud, because it’s not. And it’s also not fast. It’s altogether heavy, weighted with intensity and power. Feel free to footnote Psychocandy (singers Ian Worang and Derek Tokar do owe a thing or two to the Reid brothers) or anything from the oeuvre of Swervedriver, but Modern Currencies is less about fuzz and feedback than just plain fevered hard rock zeal. “Dark Horse” is a black-hearted meditation about mortality; “Breaking Glass” pounds away at a fractured relationship and “Minus One” is a churning blast of art school post punk. Much to admire here, but the imploring throb of “The Night Can See” and the speedbag whiplash of “These Times” come immediately to mind. Then again, so does the oddly cascading beauty of “Prison Waltz,” which finds the band intoning, “I can see the way out.” Riveting work.
—Alex Green
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