Asymmetrical Hearing: Notes from a Sbilenco Ear

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• 27 Dec, 2025 *

They sound like the Talking Heads, just a bit more off-key and deliberately more reckless. It’s a fine record: great tones, great textures, and those vocal acrobatics that make the singer feel permanently one step away from falling into the void. It’s acoustic tightrope walking that shakes you out of your chair and demands you pick a side.

A tricky album, but not a complex one. What’s the band’s intention here? Hard to tell. Maybe it’s not just playing for the sake of playing, but creating out of a need to express something. It even makes me pretend to be an audiophile, if only to settle the most urgent question I have: is it better through Lossless on my laptop? Through hi-res speakers? Through a DAC and decent headphones? The answer never changes: turn it up, way up.

Music celebrates itself best when the vibrations hit hard — that’s how instruments work anyway, through moving air — and this is the kind of record you go back to because you share both its content and its way of delivering it. I’m struck by how sincerely this album feels played and produced, which clashes with some of the commentary floating around. Schizophrenic? Audacious? Cryptic, messy, obsessive? To me it lands as a clear communicative mode that simply couldn’t take any other form.

I hear Beck-like cycles, No Means No-style self-reflection, classic textures from the ’70s onwards, and drum sounds you could have met in the ’90s. All chosen — I imagine — with a mix of seriousness and genuine fun.

A very good record, and probably a blast to play if you happen to be in a Geese cover band.