THE ARM

The Arm formed when the fourth seal was broken, and the trumpets sounded and the heavens trembled. Scenesters wept and dilettantes gnashed their teeth. The Four Horsemen picked up instruments, these being Sean ONeal on vocals and organ, Alex Lyon on guitar, Alex Ramirez on bass and Kevin Bybee on the drums. This was the death of modern music, the beginning and the end. The Alpha and The Arm.

Here are the nice things some underpaid music journalists had to say:



Splendid: "What do you do when you find an atomic bomb buried in the desert, waiting to go off? That's the impression I got when I popped this unassuming disc in my CD player the other night: the feeling that I was listening to an album that should eventually be on SPIN's "Top 100 of the '00s" or somesuch list, rattled off by trendy hipsters twenty years from now as a seminal disc in their musical epiphanies."

Now Wave: "I'm really surprised that the folks at CMJ and Pitchfork Media aren't already creaming their jeans over The Arm. Given the current popularity of art-punk (or, as the rockwrite academics like to call it, post-punk) music, a band of The Arm's ilk could easily achieve a reasonable approximation of world domination within the foreseeable future. And in The Arm's case, they'd actually deserve it."



Austin Chronicle: Eighties post-punk revivalism is now in the process of eating itself, but the Arm's second album skirts that stylistic straitjacket with the darting determinism of an apocalyptic cockroach. The band's kinetic call-and-response instrumentation connects the dots between 1979 Manchester and 1989 Washington, D.C., while singing organist Sean O'Neal rails against the grind with the tweaked ferocity of a street preacher. The agit-spaz Austin quartet gets away with being in the thrall of the Cold War herky-jerk thanks to the uncommon passion and intensity they bring to the task, and at just under 27 minutes, Call You Out is a quick ride. Call You Out may stop short, but there's strength in the Arm's unpadded efficiency.



UrbanPollution.com: Coming at a time when the post-punk revival has just begun to cannibalize itself beyond the point of recognition, Austin-based rockers The Arms second album, Call You Out, is like the little kid you want to believe will make it through the carnage, even though youre sure hell get eaten before the end. This makes it all the more delicious when the album does come through the crucible of influence and derivation unscathed.ONeal shares in [The Fall's] Mark E. Smiths ability to somehow imbue flatly declarative phrases with a psychic resonance beyond what they should plausibly contain. The band consistently generates a complex and intriguing combination of catchy pop hooks and underground aesthetics that propels the album without let-up."



Adrenalyn.net (translated from French): The ARM is a group including one future chronicle of Pitchfork will make of it a group which will draw all the attentions. There is no doubt on top: a group of arty-punk with the well written texts. It is a little as if one put a group of indie dancing in the letter-box of the NME. One can despite everything give more credit to Pitchfork than with NME. The ARM is a quartet of dynamics scene of Austin, Texas. This group is a little as a minefield which one would try to cross while running, all explodes of everywhere. Left pot in boiling where Mission of Burma, Hüsker Dü and The Constantines would struggle like famished deer. Of an irresistible urgency, Call You Out takes with the tripe, directly, with an impertinence flamer. Furibond like a tuné engine, this album is short, sharp-edged and exhausting. There is the impression to listen to a group which says "fuck" to everyone, goes up on scene and releases its instruments to dishevel its world. Small half an hour is enough for them for dévergonder our tympanums. A voice aguerrie been useful by instruments which would explode of the rocks. Pieces like "Cheap Lives" and its unrepentant verb, "To Yr Id" and its gargantuesque final or "Lovers And Agents" with its line of low ultra groovy are jumps top of a cliff. The ARM has the weapons to tackle the world if overbooké of the indie and the arms to pickle the walls of arthritic.



You can still order copies of the debut album while they last from Tightspot Records or download it from the iTunes Music Store.