On their EP ‘Care To Try?,’ the Brooklyn-based quintet Clone operates less like a traditional rock band and more like a high-tension capacitor, storing the kinetic energy of post-punk’s past only to discharge it in a series of sharp, modern shocks. While many of their contemporaries lean into the fashionable gloom of the genre, Clone approaches their music with a distinct, angular curiosity. The record feels like an experiment with friction, where the crystalline interplay of guitars meets a rhythmic foundation that is as unrelenting as a factory line. This urban atmosphere is heightened by a production style that favors a cold, clinical clarity, ensuring every percussive snap and harmonic dissonance feels like a deliberate movement within a larger, automated system.
The intelligence of the writing lies in its refusal to resolve easily, a quality most evident in the jittery, propulsive momentum of the EP’s opening title track. Here, the production carves out a hollow, echoing space that mimics the alienation of modern commerce, setting a persistent sense of patience into the arrangements. This deliberate tension reaches a fever pitch during the driving, motorik pulse of “Galvanized.” This track functions as the record’s thematic engine, exploring the friction between individual desire and the systemic pressures that demand our compliance. It asks what it means to exert effort in a world that feels increasingly indifferent, using a sonic palette that feels like a midnight walk through a district of glass and steel.
The rhythmic patterns throughout the EP suggest a sophisticated dialogue with the original New York No-Wave scene, yet they opt for a controlled geometry rather than the total tonal collapse of their predecessors. Where No-Wave used rhythm as a weapon of nihilistic chaos, Clone utilizes it as a structural grid. Gregg Giuffre’s (Pilot To Gunner), drumming is precise and skeletal, eschewing the blues-based swing of traditional rock for a mechanical rigidity that mirrors the city’s own grid-like permanence. This creates a fascinating tension; Max Idas’ (bass) solid rhythm provides a cold, immovable floor for the guitars to dance across in frantic, dissonant bursts. It is a modern evolution of the danceable discomfort pioneered in the late seventies, but polished into a sleek, industrial weapon.
LG Galleon’s (Dead Leaf Echo) vocals act as the human ghost in this machine, oscillating between a detached coolness and a more desperate yearning, particularly on the closing track “Libras At Dusk.” On this finale, the melodic lines pierce through Galleon and Dominic Turi’s wall of sound like a signal through static as the production shifts toward the claustrophobic, mirroring the lyrical entrapment of a mind circling its own anxieties. What makes the EP original is its specific palette of neon-noir, where the guitars weave intricate patterns that suggest light refracting off wet pavement, grounding the abstract philosophical questions in a very physical, nocturnal reality.
It is a work of controlled volatility, suggesting that the act of trying is both a burden and a necessary form of rebellion. By the time the final notes of the record ring out, the production has successfully merged the human and the mechanical into a singular, haunting frequency. The listener isn’t left with easy answers, but rather a profound sense of the electricity that exists in the space between hesitation and action, leaving one to wonder if the next step is a breakthrough or a breakdown.
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