I’d never heard of Muuy Biien before I got an offer to have some records sent to me. They were kind of a secondary, last-minute throw in with another record for review. That other record will not get mentioned, because I didn’t care for it at all, buuuuuuuut … D.Y.I. is pretty frickin’ great.
The album title — at least judging from the cover — stands for “Do Yourself In,” and the music is angular and bleak. “Cyclothymia I,” which opens the album, is almost three minutes of droning, chiming guitars. It then goes into this sharp-edged garage rock. It’s evocative of late-’90s indie rock, when everything was taking influence from electronic music, but reproducing it with live instrumentation.
We’re not talking electroclash, though. This is garage rock, dirty and dissonant, but it’s rhythmically Krautrock. Kind of like if Jay Reatard had listened to more Warsaw and Neu. “Cyclothymia” repeats twice more, giving the listener a chance to slow down and take a breath after the frantic energy and insistently beating rhythm. Each one thrums more loudly than the one before, however, so the sense of intensity and nervous panic doesn’t abate.If anything, the second side of D.Y.I. is even more tightly found than the first. Songs clock in under less than a minute, tightly-coiled pieces of twitchy killing you with every listen. Going from the back-to-back bursts of “Virus Evolves” to “Dust” into “Crispin Noir” makes that cut’s running time — which is still under 3 minutes — seem like a ponderously-long epic.
You can snag Muuy Biien’s D.Y.I. from the HHBTM Records store. That artwork looks amazing on the LP cover — it’s one of those rare album covers I’d actually like to have signed, framed, and hanging somewhere in my house.
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