Intelligence

Intelligence

Lil' Peril

Mt. St. Mtn.

***LARS FINBERG, confirmed genius guy and poet laureate of sunken 21st century Rock, acts as manager in perpetuity of THE INTELLIGENCE, primary vehicle for his prolific creative swirl and a project that has taken on new shapes across myriad trials and shifts. The project began in his Seattle bedroom—a lad and his Tascam cassette 8 track—with the classic Boredom & Terror and has now landed in his Los Angeles studio apartment—an urchin and his Tascam digital 12 track—with Lil’ Peril, a new album that finds Finberg 1000% back at the controls. Over the course of 11 albums (!), The Intelligence has established a backbone that boogies through revolutions, allowing each jam-crammed dispatch to feel and sound admirably unique. The angular sharp shocks heard in earlier years have steadily evolved into the ballooning grooves heard on more recent releases (including Finberg’s recent solo work). Lil’ Peril is a dreamy gamble that captures this current bubbling penchant in The Intelligence’s inaugural homemade mode. With inspirational templates as far-flung as Les Paul, The Specials, Lee Perry and Mary Ford, Lil’ Peril pulls off the absurd shift “from ‘No-Wave Santana’ to ‘Screamers recorded by Jon Brion”. Playing shoulder parrot to studio engineers has no doubt informed Finberg’s approach to home recording, specifically in how much further he can go without wincing budget-minded eyes staring him down. This is immediately sensed on the opener “Maudlin Agency,” which begins with canned minimal bleep and closes with a full recreation of the “Brass Monkey” hook. These surprise-attack...

Intelligence

Celebration Ratio

Leisure World

***LARS FINBERG and THE INTELLIGENCE return with a kick-ass new track released on a limited edition 7-inch flexi.

Intelligence

Un-Psychedelic In Peavey City

V.M.I.

“Still panting from their installment in Castle Face’s Live In San Francisco series (where they ran a greatest hits clinic for basement sweat-rats) and from mega-mind Lars Finberg’s outside solo oddballer, Moonlight Over Bakersfield, The Intelligence return in Neu-veau mode with Un-Psychedelic In Peavey City, their tenth studio album-amalgam.  Load up on electrolytes, all ye who enter here…“The customary tin / aluminum milestone won’t fit this true band of steel:  the current Intelligence iteration is the most forceful and dynamic of any line-up in the project’s history.  Although each performer has been smeared across myriad recordings and tours for years, the now-time assemblage of Drew Church (bass), Dave Hernandez (guitar) and Kaanan Tupper (drums) currently positions The Intelligence as a world-class unit, with members playing in partnership with conductor Finberg rather than at his sometimes-service.  Lars is giving the back-rubs now, not getting ‘em—a delightful and cruel twist. “There’s no aspect of Un-Psychedelic In Peavey City that tilts toward phoned-in safe plays, no easy feat for a 10-albums-deep unit.  For this collection, the band cast off the comforts of their traditional cosmopolitan haunts (Sacramento, Costa Mesa, etc.) in favor Grass Valley’s Louder Studios, a wilderness recording burg (OK OK, with a pool, yes) helmed by Tim Green, a twiddler maestro who has assisted Bikini Kill, Melvins, Comets On Fire, Wand and countless others in sterling fashion.  The resultant recordings are the most expansive Intelligence material imaginable—perhaps Un-Psychedelic, but certainly free, playfully abstract and awesomely stretched out.”    —Mitch Cardwell

Intelligence

Live In San Francisco

Castle Face

“For folks who dig A Frames, Country Teasers, Wire, Gang of Four, pita chips and dad’s boozy breath, may we present The Intelligence, captured live in a truly subterranean underground show space below SF vintage clothier Vacation. “Lars Finberg: a name synonymous with artisanal hand-crafted, locally brewed, and organically-farmed song lasers. Hilarious, fast, tour-tight and ballsy—the band has all these perks in pocket, and all that on borrowed gear! I’ve watched this band go through many variations over the years and in their own right all of them have been marvelous. This particular version of the line up is constructed entirely of road-dogs. These guys don’t fuck around—or maybe they only fuck around, who can tell anymore? They drink, they get bawdy, they shred, and when we asked Lars if the band would be into doing a small show in a basement in the Tenderloin in SF for a live LP, he asked ‘What should we play?’ and I replied ‘nothing but the hits’—and they did exactly that. “The Intelligence and Lars himself are masters at the penning of hits—hit after hit after hit—and with a soft-shoed tippity-tap of crowd work and banter, you can really smell the basement on this one and feel the cobwebs grazing the top of your head as you go deaf in one ear from the eye level PA pointed directly at your soul hole. If you love this band then this is a great live LP of them scorching the hits and talking trash....

Intelligence

Boredom And Terror / Let’s Toil

In The Red

In The Red is proud to announce the new double-vinyl reissue of The Intelligence’s debut album, Boredom and Terror. Originally released on Narnack / Omnibus Records in 2004, Boredom and Terror is the first time Lars Finberg stepped out from behind The A-Frames’ drum kit to showcase his own music. Later releases by The Intelligence were fleshed out with additional musicians, but on this debut album Lars was an army of one toting an eight-track recorder and a notebook full of songs. The results are as original as they are incredible. This is lo-fi post-punk electro garage-core, equal parts Devo, The Fall and something altogether its own. This new edition of Boredom and Terror has been newly remastered. The original vinyl release contained an eleven-track bonus CD which is included here as a second LP. Both are housed in a beautiful gatefold sleeve.  “Lars Finberg, the lo-fi dandy of West Seattle, locked his front door and pressed the record button on his favorite eight-track machine and made songs that could be either ecclesiastic alien probes, Hank Williams going electro-slash, or John Lennon making friends with a video game.” —Insound

Intelligence

Everybody’s Got It Easy But Me

In The Red

Around since 1999, The Intelligence has to date released seven singles, five split singles, two EPs, seven albums and have made eight compilation appearances. They join the ranks of hyper-prolific artists like Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall in the impossible-to-stay-on-top-of department. That said, like the aforementioned artists, with each release The Intelligence continues to evolve, grow artistically and top themselves. And, yes, you do need to keep up with all the releases.   With Everybody’s Got It Easy But Me, The Intelligence do indeed top themselves. As with their previous album, Males from 2010, they returned to The Hangar with Chris Woodhouse to record, and they continue to jettison their deliberately blown-out, lo-fi recording approach for a much clearer sound. Not that there’s any loss of intensity. The band’s scrambling post-punk guitars, dry-as-a-bone drums and laconically abstract verses are all here, viewed through an unusually clear lens. If one didn’t have the songs or the chops, this sort of thing could reveal weakness but here it highlights their knack for catchy songs that incorporate pop hooks, metronomically repetitive guitar riffs, and new wavey synth moves. For those who haven’t been paying attention, The Intelligence are the brainchild of Lars Finberg (formerly of A-Frames, currently of Thee Oh Sees and Wounded Lion). Initially a studio project in which Finberg played all instruments on his home recordings, the band soon began to play live and tour, while the releases volleyed between solo and ensemble recordings. On Everybody’s Got It Easy But...

Intelligence

Males

In The Red

Males is the sixth full-length release from Seattle, Washington's The Intelligence. This time, main-brain Lars Finberg ditched his usual method of recording all the instruments himself and had his current touring band play on it--Susannah Welbourne, Beren Ekine Huett (Eat Skull) and Chris Woodhouse (Mayyors, FM Knives, Karate Party), who also served as the record's producer. Hopefully this will still be the current line up by the time you read this. The results are as powerful as a punch in the face by Mike Tyson but with the velvet touch of a dandy fop. Marrying buzzsaw punk, DIY post-punk, ramshackle garage (as in played by The Fall--not the Chesterfield Kings), and pop hooks aplenty, Males is The Intelligence's finest statement to date.  "[The Intelligence casts] a pronounced British Invasion pop influence in warped, peak-level lo-fi sonics, emphasizing a connection between post-punk and psychedelia that stretches from Clinic and Guided by Voices through the deconstructionist pop of Swell Maps and Wire and back to the whimsical wordsmithery of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence." --Pitchfork

Intelligence

Fake Surfers

In The Red

Fake Surfers, the fourth album by Seattle's prolific and sacred Intelligence, is destined to change your whole outlook on "pop" music. As with 2007's Deuteronomy, The Intelligence has employed In The Red house producer Mike McHugh at the Distillery to hone their edge to its sharpest yet. The possibility of an industrial/pop music crossover seems as unlikely as a black metal/country conglomeration, but on this new album, The Intelligence introduces a whole new spectrum of sonic awareness cleverly buried under little piles of dirt, with glimmering specks of brilliance poking through.  Lars Finberg, who performs here as The Intelligence, makes experimental post-punk rock weighted down by paranoia. As the bolts-and-bolts drummer of A-Frames, he builds songs off goose-stepping beats and coded lyrics. The Intelligence can't help but swing a little, however--the singing hints at emotion, as stilted phrasing sometimes becomes a howl. It never breaks a sweat, but these songs are like pop that has been wiretapped, shocked, and muzzled, whereas the A-Frames are a robot's guess at how rock music sounds.  The Intelligence has faint whiffs of Swell Maps, Tronics, and Wire's Chairs Missing, though Fake Surfers is more relaxed and evenly paced than any previous releases. The sole cover on the album, "Pony People" by LA's Wounded Lion, has been stripped down to an acoustic pop ditty. This is by far the best Intelligence release yet...until the next one.

Intelligence

Deuteronomy

In The Red

If musicians painted images with their instruments, The Intelligence’s soundscapes would be set in a grainy, ash-gray world, among piles of scrap metal and busted machinery, with discarded computer parts blinking in cobwebbed corners and factories belching out toxins at irregular intervals. It’d be a black-andwhite wasteland of humanity, a post-apocalyptic industrial revolution, warmed only by the distant loops of a delayed, disembodied guitar riff. At the center of it all would be Lars Finberg, delivering deadpan lines like “Going out with you is like going out with a cop.” He’d be pounding bent garbage-can lids with one hand and programming distorted beats on his keyboard with the other, a one-man laboratory of intoxicating post-punk experimentation.  The music is so jagged and cinematically poetic and dusted in clouds of lo-fi noise that listening to it at different times can conjure completely different visions. It’s par for the course for Finberg, who has participated in some of Seattle’s most exciting musical forces such as the A-Frames and The Dipers. The Intelligence are demanding attention in and beyond the Northwest, creating a new direction in sound based on the fundamental elements of bands like The Fall and PiL, yet beneath the post-punk clang lies a serious pop sensibility.  These pop chops have never been more noticeable than on Deuteronomy, the band’s third full-length. Finberg swears that The Zombies’ Odyssey and Oracle as well as early Bee Gees albums influenced his direction, though it sounds like Here Come The Warm Jets...

Intelligence

Icky Baby

In The Red

***Seattle, Washington's Lars Finberg is unstoppable and responsible for some of the best music blasting out of the underground at the moment. Lars structures the A-Frames' post-apocalyptic pop world where he handles drum duties. Then there's the diabolical Dipers, where he throws down that lo-fi noisy rumble of burning trash and car-wreck rock wiping the shit blood all over your blue suede shoes. But his main vehicle, The Intelligence, combines the best of all worlds in a wonderland of sonic horizons, poppy dance field rock, and if ya have time to think, brilliant lyrics. Intelligence utilize melodic acoustic guitars with wire-cutting electric riffs, crushed keyboards, jumping jack fun drums and singalong vocal melodies. The recording sounds like they crawl inside a beat-up trashcan to bang out the hits while tumbling down a granite mountain covered in volcanic ash.   Their debut album, Boredom and Terror, was first released on CD by Omnibus Records and later on LP by Narnack. It featured thirteen perfectly crafted songs that were created by Lars on his home recording unit. Icky Baby, their much anticipated follow up, was recorded with a full band on selected tracks and mixed in with Finberg's usual demented home recordings. The result is a much more aggressive Intelligence than heard previously-- a sound much closer to the band's live performances than their debut album. Be prepared to have your mind blown!