The five tracks on the Foundry Field Recordings’ new EP Fallout Stations act as a companion piece to last year’s full-length Prompts/Miscues, and it finds the band continuing its fuzzed-out shoegaze-influenced sound.  The title track is a haunting, echoed start to the album and shows the band at its most fragile, while “Buy/Sell/Trade” amps up the noise to show the band’s ability to rock.  “Transistor Kids”, the disc’s finale acts as a microcosm of the band’s sound, as it builds from humble, far-off beginnings and builds to a stadium rock smoldering finish.  And, in between these songs, the band shows their hand a bit by covering the Pixies’ “Caribou”.  It wouldn’t be hard to site them as an influence without the inclusion of this track, but even if it might take away from the originality of their sound, the cover is somehow both true to the original and soaked with the Foundry Field Recording’s own love for more atmospheric noise.  If there’s a downside to all of this, it is that these five solid tracks almost get lost in a mound of excessive clicks and hisses.  The first two minutes or so of the EP are dedicated to ambient noise that detracts from a great song more than it adds to it.  Often, the noise found here acts as interludes between the actual songs, but it doesn’t add density to the EP so much as crowd it with elements that sound more pretentious than necessary.

• "Transistor Kids" MP3
• Multiple songs MySpace