Bandcamp Twelve songs, twenty nine and a half minutes, and the longest one is four minutes two. Seven are under two and a half. The record is finished before a lot of albums in this corner have got through their intro, and that compression is the whole design rather than a side effect of it.
Very Paranoia are a San Francisco four piece, Cory Linstrum on vocals, Rob Alper on guitar and backing vocals, Chris Grande on bass, Jefferson Marshall on drums. This is the second LP, recorded by Phil Becker at El Studio and mastered by Mikey Young. The sleeve shows four silhouettes against a wall cut by a hard diagonal of light, which makes the title a description of the picture as well as the record.
Nine of the twelve tracks sit in the same narrow band, between about five and seven decibels from their quietest to their loudest moment, bright and forward with the energy centred high. For garage punk that is correct rather than compressed, and the mastering leaves real room at the top, so the tightness here is a band playing hard at a fixed level instead of a limiter deciding for them.
The interesting part is which two tracks break the pattern, because it is not the two you would guess.
“Man From Afghanistan” is the only song on the record that Very Paranoia did not write, credited to D. Curtiss and C. Maldoon, and it moves through nearly eleven decibels where most of the album sits between five and seven. Something about playing somebody else’s song loosened them up, and it is audible without knowing the credits.
“Downtown Paranoia” closes the album and opens to seventeen and a half decibels, around three times the album’s usual range. It is also the quietest piece here and the one where the band stop driving and let the thing breathe. After twenty six minutes of forward pressure it lands hard, and it raises the obvious question: they can clearly do this, so why only once.
That is the reservation, and it is a small one. A record this short earns the right to pick one setting and stay in it, and most of the twelve are good enough that you do not notice the sameness until the closer shows you the alternative. Recommended, particularly if you want something that says what it has to say and then stops. Start at “Downtown Paranoia” to hear the range, then go back to the top and take the other eleven at speed.
One note on timing. The digital release has been out since 9 June and the vinyl arrives on 31 October, which is why this is appearing now rather than in the summer. Linstrum’s explanation for the gap was that they put the digital up early because they were too excited to wait, which is the most Very Paranoia thing in the whole correspondence.
Nine of twelve tracks measure between about five and seven decibels from their quiet to their loud passages. The exceptions are “Man From Afghanistan” at nearly eleven and “Downtown Paranoia” at seventeen and a half, with “Julian Lightning” sitting between the two groups at nine and a half.
The closer is also the quietest track by average level and carries the highest peak-to-average figure on the album, almost three decibels above the record’s norm. Everything else holds within a decibel of the same level, so the album plays at one volume until it deliberately does not.
Brightness is consistent and high, with the spectral centre between 1880 and 2513 Hz. “Downtown Paranoia” is the darkest of the twelve, which is the same track as every other exception on this record.
Standout tracks: Downtown Paranoia, Man From Afghanistan, Visual Division
