***"News came through while getting comfortable with the sounds of Surveillance’s debut album Less Than One, More Than Zero that guitarists/vocalists Dave Burns and Rachel Fry were to be married later that week. Not having access to their registry, I suppose I could send a chafing dish, though to be fair their record is burning brightly enough to heat up whatever canapes might await in their ostensibly long life together. After an initial blast of activity in the mid-‘10s, which produced a 7” single that I found quite fetching, and a number of cassettes that I hadn’t the good fortune to hear, activity around Surveillance proved sporadic, as did information about them (here I was in Chicago, here they were in Halifax). I was delighted to find their Planet Serum tape through an American punk distro during the pandemic pause (hey, what better time to unearth forgotten studio recordings, right? Also, how many other musical acts named Surveillance would trickle down that path?) and with it came some weird close-talkin’ vibes couching top-flyte buzzsaw song-based material—the band I really liked before was still in there, plowing away, intact in the presence of hard-hitter Tri Le on the drums and eventual addition of Ben Brennan in the pocket on bass. Which leads us to this album, a purity test of sorts that hearkens, for some, back to a time of greater innocence, tempered with the expectations of now. There’s grunge, there’s flyin’ the flannel, and the piney, open-air, guitar-stacks-to-the-bluest-skies approach Surveillance...
LP $20.50
11/17/2023