Inca Ore: The Birds in the Bushes

The singularly-named Eva of Inca Ore is one strange cat, at least as evidenced by her second album, a collaboration with Lemon Bear called The Birds in the Bushes. She’ll suck you in with noise — “Glossolalia the Gift of the Tongue”, a dissonant experience replete with clanging, screaming, and pianos whose intensity is upped by adding an echo to the already abrasive vocals halfway through the track, is the first “song” on The Birds in the Bushes that will make you sit up and take notice, while “Lucky One” and “I Will Kill You”, later on in the album, approach aural snuff. These are the ones you’ll notice upon your first listen to the album, the ones you’ll talk about and debate and compare to Yoko Ono. Still, for all the banging and the aggressive nature of those three, it’s the other tracks with the longer, developed material in which Eva shows her gift for creating atmosphere and evoking mood. The title track is, for its part, a truly bizarre combination of arrhythmic percussion and animal noises (think a simulated “Sounds of the Jungle” record), the slowly-building horror of “Spine Milk” will subtly terrify you, and the lovely, atmospheric, and occasionally even melodic eleven-minute epic “Cape Meares” will lull you into complacency just long enough for the aforementioned “I Will Kill You” to shock you out of what peace you might have found. Granted, there’s very little in the way of rhythm or melody to be found here — this is emotional evocation via sound and noise — but Inca Ore and Lemon Bear do it well enough that it’s hard to stop listening, difficult as such listening so often proves to be.