Muuy Biien

Muuy Biien

D.Y.I. (Do Yourself In)

Happy Happy Birthday To Me

***Last year’s This Is What Your Mind Imagines featured a bunch of teenage boys about to go off. Like early Husker Du, it bypassed conventional notions of melody and headed straight for pure anger. Nevertheless, every paper in Athens put MUUY BIIEN on the cover. For DYI they’re going to need to build them a goddamn statue. Only a year on from their debut, Muuy Biien have undergone an evolution nearly as startling as the primordial fish that grew lungs and crawled onto land. It’s a band that is about to make the lazy comparisons of the past—to Savages, to Iceage, to Joy Division, to The Fall—seem ridiculous. It may be all anger & brutality on the surface, but there’s a pop sensibility at its heart, a buoyancy that TIWYMI lacked. That album was a pure laser beam of black & white rage, but DYI finds the band slowing down every so slightly and allowing things into the songs—melody, vulnerability, dynamics, hooks—that up till now you had to look closely to find. Muuy Biien is the real thing. No college degrees, no connections, no future. Kids in their 20s raised in the Georgia countryside, born to work in fast food—the band members met while all working at fried chicken chain Raisin’ Cane’s, eventually moving in together like some kind of white trash Monkees.   But art springs forth from the unlikeliest of places (though you’d think everyone would know by now that being rich in Brooklyn doesn’t give you access to...

Muuy Biien

This Is What Your Mind Imagines

Happy Happy Birthday To Me

***It’s the sound of someone tearing their room and their mind to pieces. This Is What Your Mind Imagines, the debut album from Athens, Georgia’s MUUY BIIEN, is the soundtrack to your next nervous breakdown, your next transcendence. Five guys in their early 20s living in the same house, working at the same fast-food chicken place, like an enraged underclass version of The Monkees. They spend their days besieged by college students in their Bulldog sweatshirts and BMW’s, and spend their nights looking for a way out. Like an American Mark E. Smith, singer JOSH EVANS delivers his lyrics with a vicious snap. He has no patience for fools—no patience for anything. He sings of prisons that are spherical and without exits, songs of family violence and loneliness. It’s punk without the pose, punk without the poise, a desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of your memories. Muuy Biien knows that eternity is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness, and sometimes not even then. TIWYMI ricochets between moments of pure black anger (think side 2 of Zen Arcade) and blissed-out white ambience (think Eno’s unrecorded album Music For Shitholes). One is a dream, the other reality, but there’s no telling which. And the ambience is even more intimidating, more frightening, than the rage. It’s the sound of someone lost in labyrinths of thought who may not ever return. With another album scheduled later this year, the band is moving fast, charging headfirst into melody and...