CD Review: Conformity Contortion "Perception Management" (Personal Archives)

$8 //
https://personalarchives.bandcamp.com/album/perception-management //

Music can be a terribly wonderful thing.   I spent a good while listening to this CD (and I won't say how long exactly) thinking that the sounds I heard accompanying the drums were coming from an electric guitar.   I even made comparisons with Jimi Hendrix in my notes.  I said: "lots of effects make for an interesting guitar sound".    But as I later read the details of Conformity Contortion, I realized that there is no guitar.  Alas, it is a keyboard and I was wrong all along.   But in all fairness, it does sound like a guitar sometimes which is just a testament to how well it is played.

The keys seem to sing their way through songs of smooth soul and then it can also pick up into this spy theme type of vibe.   As the pace picks up, it has a "Resident Evil" vibe to it and the only band I can compare this with really is The Advantage, which is kind of crazy because I always feel like I should be able to pull more influences out than that, especially when it's under the giant umbrella of "rock".   From a circus type of sound to church organs to even the blues, it seems only natural the keys make themselves known as this comes out sounding like The Doors (Though I don't count that as a true comparison because it's such a vast focal point)

While the music grows a bit deeper and darker it can have that video game sound to it as well.   It's still psych though, still weird.   By the end I'm hearing a lot of what sounds like Transformers and this has really come a long way for me personally, since at one point I thought of it as being fuzzy guitar riffs with loud drums.    The one thing I really need to note that you need to pay the closest attention to about this CD though is that while Conformity Contortion is a duo and that duo is made up of keys and drums, most people might think that whatever isn't drums sort of comes to the front of the sound. 

This is not the case here.  Neither of them really step out in front of the other (though they can both be loud) and that is one of the finer aspects of it as well.  Imagine a band with the drums and bass in the background and two guitars playing in harmony.   You somehow get a better sense of that unison here and it's that much more special because it is somewhere which you think it would be that much less likely.