[the year] EP

Special Noise

As I continue reminiscing about my formative years in the Sudbury music scene, I revisited one of the coolest live acts to pass through during that time. I first saw Special Noise in a small field house and it was kind of amazing. Just a guitar and drum duo from Montréal playing spontaneous math rock jams at a time when I literally just heard of Hella and was still trying to wrap my head around that. After the performance, I picked up this EP and listened to it a lot. Again, being a drummer, I was drawn to the numerous interesting drum grooves which typically involved some fancy footwork. One of the coolest drum parts in my opinion comes at the midway point of Define You. It's hard to explain but the groove is in an odd time signature and the drum tag at the end of each phrase feels like a bit of a hiccup. It's one of those 'wait a minute, play that back' kind of moments and then you realize that they're only playing a trick on you. Some of the guitar work is really impressive as well, especially on [the year] fun died. This track floored me when I first saw them live. The guitar player (my apologies for not knowing your name) performs the entire track using a two-handed tapping technique and has the brain capacity to sing at the same time. It was really quite impressive.

The only unfortunate thing is that the production is not the cleanest, which really shouldn't be surprising for a weirdo rock duo playing a very niche style of music. The guitar is quite crunchy and lacks a little definition at times. The drums on some tracks are a little too boomy or muddy to make out all the intricate details in the drummer's performance. Despite that, the EP is still lots of fun to listen to. The band doesn't seem to be too active today, and I don't think they made much of a name for themselves. But if for some reason they ever read this, I would like them to know that on one particular occasion in a random field house in Sudbury, they blew my mind.