new music: check the stunningly psychedelic indie pop of the anti-job’s ‘you’re not real’ #soundcheck

We try to cover the absolute latest in music, but sometimes something comes your way that you just can’t believe you missed when it came out in the first place. I cannot in good conscience sit on The Anti-Job’s 2013 release You’re Not Real.

By Nathan Leigh, AFROPUNK Contributor

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Led by composer Amanda Jones, the band eschews the proggier instincts and bombast of an artist who came up collaborating with famed film scorer Hans Zimmer. Instead, The Anti-Job mines their depth from the tension between Amanda Jones’ folk-inflected hushed melodies and the band’s love for coloring in the margins with noise. “You’re Not Real” is a perfect indie-pop gem, taking subtle cues from that fork of the DC sound pushed by bands like Shudder to Think and Beauty Pill. “This world is poetry” Amanda Jones sings right before the hand claps chime in, inviting us to “celebrate fear / with no more tears.” On ‘Joni Mitchell in Love,’ the band teases a 3 minute intro. Ethereal “oohs” float over a dreamy riff that builds and releases without ever quite becoming a song. A brief chorus of “you’re what I want / you’re what I need” climaxes in the middle before the song devolves again. It probably shouldn’t work, but it does, almost the sonic equivalent of butterflies in your stomach.

The band’s magnum opus is their 8 minute closer “9 to 5” (which has nothing in common with Dolly Parton for better or for worse). A journey from commute to cacophony, the song is the synthesis of their philosophy of music as liberation from the drudgeries of work, the anti-job, if you will. Over the band’s loudest riffs, Amanda Jones pleads with herself to “wait for tomorrow.” From the explosive build and release of their jittering alt rock, the band invokes the catharsis from work-stress of a killer rock show. Drenched in feedback and distortion, the bullshit vanishes. There is only music.

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Reportedly, The Anti-Job has been in the studio working on new music. In the meantime, let You’re Not Real carry you through. I promise we won’t wait this long to cover it.

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https://www.facebook.com/theantijob