Muuy Biien

***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 power, bringing the gray smudge into beautiful focus. They may never be this raw again. It’s the opposite of Brooklyn, the opposite of privilege. Muuy Biien have their bullshit detectors turned up to 10 and they fear nothing.