At first glance, HO-AG, is straight forward Art punk with a few synthesizers, often audible vocals, and some interesting lyrics about a post-apocalyptic urban landscape.

I am not immediately impressed by the creativity of the record, though it is clean and crisp sounding because I want to hear the band play live. At which point, I'm almost certain I would become unhealthily obsessed. The problem is for me, that when I think "Art-Noise" I start to judge a band in terms of, not just its records (See the band Boston), but its live show and even the way it dresses. However, this is mostly insider bias. I just feel like, with all the power of the "Art" label comes a great deal of responsibility: a responsibility, above all else, to keep the label meaning something good and creative and holistically avant-garde.

According to the World Wide Web, people who have seen the show generally have good things to say: so much for the primacy of the music reviewer ethos. I suppose I could follow up with a concert review if HO-AG makes it the West Coast this fall.

Musically, sitting in my sterile suburban house, I can only dissect what I hear on the CD. I discern fully exposed, completely crisp rhythmic shifts, hard breaks, and slashing cuts. What does this mean to my central nervous system? I sit in complete terror. I feel paranoid and I am sweating slightly.

Noisy, angular guitars are interspersed with quite a bit of discomfiting pauses and silences. The absurd tension between sections of songs which totally blend your brain into mush and sections, not subdued but ominously lacking in noise, make the record hard to listen to on a quiet summer afternoon.