Cassette Review: Big Hiatus "Towards It"

$5 //
Edition of 10 //
https://heyexit.bandcamp.com/album/towards-it //

Big Hiatus is the duo of Brendan (Hey Exit) and David (Painted Faces) and I would call them a super group but I feel like you need more than two members to be a group, right?  While I'm not here to debate the language of it all, I just know that these two people are responsible for two of my favorite music projects so to join forces is the type of thing a music listener such as myself can seemingly only dream of and yet also makes me think about who else I would like to hear team up as well as the other duos I've heard that I still want to call super groups.   I'm also still on a really big duo kick because I like how they can either seemingly blend together or be at odds. 

This starts off kind of quiet but then these bursts of alien-like technology come through.   There are waves, drums, something like static and even loud crashes.    It feels like a guitar is resonating while screeches and squeals come through with it.    Somewhere between relaxing ambient and chaos, frequency whirrs come through to disrupt any type of chill you might be feeling (Though if you're strong enough, you can still chill to this)    Transformers meet droids as the signals seem to be changing with different levels of robotics.   Guitars resonate while the robotic electronics seem to do this freak out thing- not quite glitch, but close. 

On the flip side we start off with heavily distorted guitars and electronics mixed in.   It feels as if there are almost screams in here, that laser whirr taking us into such a dark place.   This then somehow turns into a super-sonic space war.    Synths (but probably guitars) seem to come in now as if victory has been achieved.   There are bursts of static and sharpness now as well.     It really hits this stride between desolate and destruction.   The end sort of drifts off though there is this one sequence of notes that seems to just make it in there before the cut off.

If you have heard the music of Hey Exit and you have heard the music of Painted Faces then you can likely imagine something similar to what I imagined a crossover between the two would sound like.   And yet, Big Hiatus does not sound like that.    There are more elements of Hey Exit in here than there are of Painted Faces and in that sense too I feel like this has the sound of two different artists joining together and I've always been kind of interested in certain sounds being combined (putting beats behind More Eaze for example)

While the first side feels more seperate, more like the two sounds working side by side but not against each other, they seem to really find their groove and come together on Side B to where it is difficult to distinguish between the two.   To use a tired cliche: on Side B, the two become one.   While this may not be exactly how I would have imagined this collaboration, you have to think that if it was what I had imagined would I have been disappointed?  It's far less interesting to write "Yeah, this sounds how you would think it does".    Big Hiatus gives you something different, something better and something worth talking about.