There aren’t many labels as reliable as Slumberland Records, which for the past 20 years has not just guaranteed quality in a general sense (the way SST and Matador used to/still do), but has also promised a consistency of feeling and attitude in all their releases. When you buy a Slumberland record, you may not be able to predict where along the noisiness spectrum it will fall, but you’ll know you’ve bought a piece of deeply felt bedroom pop, with a strong sense of the past and a belief in the raw beauty of burstingly melodic sound. Call it the Slumberland Promise. You could even make it into a way of life, one in which the 7” is the primary unit of cultural currency, and LPs are only necessary when your record player is far from your bed and you don’t want to get up to switch sides every 2.5 minutes. A way of life whose rhythms and abundant detail are perfectly captured in Stranger Than Paradise and the films of Andrew Bujalski.
Or that’s one way to hear Doomed Forever, the debut album by a duo called Procedure Club. Press for the record indicates that Andrea Belair and Adam Malec formed the band in 2008 out of their shared reverence for The Jesus & Mary Chain and Bach, after growing bored with their lives of poverty in New Haven, Connecticut. I consider it just as likely that they were raised in a boarding school secretly operated by Slumberland Records, where the only classes are rudimentary music lessons and the only homework is the complete recordings of Black Tambourine. How else to explain the way that every release on the label sounds like every previous release?
But, if individual directors were able to thrive within the Hollywood studio system of the 30s and 40s, then Belair and Malec are individuals too in the far less ominous Slumberland Machine. There’s enough here that reminds me of mid-90s Magnetic Fields (and the experimental pre-Fields work of Stephin Merritt) to make me think that Procedure Club may yet become fussy formalists, the way Merritt has. A number of these songs (“Artificial Light,” “Rather”) begin with skeletal and fabulously graceless rhythms, which become the organizing principle when an overlay of fuzzy guitars, charmingly obnoxious synths and vaporous vocals jolt from the speakers. That was the Merritt formula in a nutshell on albums like Holiday, before he became our Cole Porter. Messy as Procedure Club’s music is on its surface, they betray a firm commitment to verse-chorus-verse, played out along simple melodic lines, to the extent that the songs’ very form becomes a sort of Platonic ideal. The noisy decorations then are variations on a theme, and the place where the fun happens.
There’s a band called A Sunny Day In Glasgow who for the past few years have been making hour-long masterpieces that venture under the skin of shoegazer rock and noise pop like what Procedure Club practice (they’ve perhaps even internalized the entire Slumberland discography). Their albums are structurally adventurous, alighting on deep grooves before returning to ghostly ambience. Their music is so enormous in my mind as to nearly swallow up all other attempts at the same, but I’d hesitate to say they make an album as good as Doomed Forever irrelevant. There’s a certain majesty in Procedure Club’s Noise (and they really do make capital-N Noise—it’s one of their most arresting qualities), so that even when the simple structures and melodies keep threatening to pull you back to earth, you can swear they’re ready to risk it all for a little sweet oblivion. They’ll shake their poverty yet.
