Clipd Beaks: Hoarse Lords

Noise-rock seems to undergoing a sort of vogue right now, with new proponents like Health and Pre emerging faster than you can say “ear plugs”. Fortunately for the late-emerging noise-rock talent, with unpredictability and rule-breaking held as virtue, there’s a better chance that new examples will be able to keep genre monotony at bay. Such seems to be the case with recently-relocated-Minnesotans Clipd Beaks. Their Lovepump United debut is a predictably messy spectacle of broken samples, battered percussion, clobbering bass, smears of guitar, and distorted yelps of vocals. Tracks constantly threaten to fly apart completely but never quite do; there’s just enough song-sense here to keep everything intelligibly together. But while the template — clever young people finding creative ways to make a racket — is very familiar by now, the specifics are peculiar enough to prevent Clipd Beaks from sounding quite like anyone else.