Oregon Music News

review by William Ham

System and Station have been pounding out the pop for over a decade now, and it shows: these boys are so tight they’re practically telepathic, negotiating every turn of musical phrase with both sinew and muscle memory, toughened by a thousand and one nights of playing the undercard in sweaty clubs and open-air festivals with low-ball corporate sponsorship, driven by an aggression sustained for so long it feels like ease.  It’s no accident that the sleeve of I’m Here to Kill shows the foursome bruised, bloody and glaring back at the listener as if in a series of mugshots – making your way in the music scene these days is a little like being in the middle of the world’s longest bar fight, and it ain’t that pretty at all.

But these mugs deserve credit for staying in the fray for so long, so listen up: release #9, available via vinyl or download only, is a series of six clean shots designed to punch precise holes in the wall of sound, and they’re downright meticulous in their attack.  The first two, “Love Etc.” and “Bird Will Fly,” match their anti-romantic interpersonal diatribes with tightly-wound sounds, tense but fluid like a pissed-off close-order drill team even when they veer off briefly into upped-tempo flutter-kicks.  Having marked their territory, they lay out a little in the two that follow, “Highway Crawl” and “Patterns,” throwing a little ache into their aggro and using their effects boxes to spike the mix with just enough strychnine to make you see trails when the fists finally fly.  All of which allows them to indulge what passes for their sensitive sides as they close things out – the slow, expansive power-wash of “We See Ourselves Shining Brightly” (the EP’s highlight) and the bongolated, cello-shot acoustic plaint of the title track, which may lull you into a sense of ease until the final, quiet vow of chilly retribution the whole record’s been building to.  At which point it’s probably wise to stop resisting and let them do what they came to do – they’ve been at this too long to back down now.