Institute: Salt EP

Singer Moses Brown has a knack for sounding belligerently intoxicated on Institute’s new Salt EP, perhaps nowhere more so than on the title track: “It don’t mean shit/Salt of the earth/Don’t mean shit,” he repeats in a slurred bark, as if letting out a bitter vent about the consolation prizes of the working class to whoever else happens to be sitting at the bar. It’s not entirely eloquent, but it gets the point across.

Though a relatively new band — featuring members of many others, such as Wiccans and Glue — from Austin, “Salt” nails the wiry chill of late-‘70s post punk, setting up the record as a kind of American second cousin to Joy Division’s An Ideal for Living EP. Swapping Northern bleakness for bile, Brown’s unsparing sights focus inward as much as outward, at times like a form of public therapy. “I wasn’t punished as child/So I punished myself,” he declares on “Immorality”, surely a painful admission by any standards. But, having first proclaimed, “You were ashamed/Of what you knew,” it’s clear that no one gets away scot-free.

For all its indignation and urgency, Salt’s seriousness shouldn’t be mistaken for humorlessness. Toward the start of “Familiar Stranger”, as the down-picked bass and bent-note guitar engage in their best vintage “Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner” duel, Brown delivers the wry punchline in a dead tone: “Nostalgia/It’s fragile.” Not to mention that it’s hard not to find at least a small measure of mirth in a chorus that goes “Immorality’s neat!” At five songs that mostly hover under the three-minute mark, Salt burns fast but fiercely, leaving its carbon traces smeared on everything it touches.