So Many Dynamos

• HorsePower
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Nov 21, 2009

Passionate Man And Impassionate Machines Gather

Words by Sean Moeller, Illustration by Johnnie Cluney, Sound engineering by Mike Gentry

It doesn't completely feel as if we're amidst full-bloodied humans, moving and acting via free will and operating without an expressed and standard programming to deal with any combination of facts and conditions. If the sky is light blue and the registering air temperature upon the lower forearm, by its built-in capturing device is higher than 75 degrees, then actions should be underway to get into swimming attire and find the nearest in-ground pool or public lake. Should the temperature be below that, the response by the nerves from the arms to the brain would be dramatically different, determined to produce certain motions would alter incrementally as appropriate. We're talking about droids or those who were made as robots, and act as robots in all ways other than in their thinking about and feeling of music, behaving as beings who look down at their feet and hips and find themselves utterly perplexed at what's come over them this time, just like the other times before it. The work of St. Louis band So Many Dynamos works like some kind of demented science project, a control subject or subjects that suddenly flip out and start performing and acting out of the ordinary, splitting off from convention and just making all kinds of unpredictable choices. The frantic and multiplying guitar lines are dispersed like taser lines and chickens on fire, squirming and crossing over one another like cats that have had their tails stomped on or children strung out on sugar and soda pop. The doubling guitars and the ways in which they form such cohesive passages of controlled chaos is at the center of what makes this foursome such a pistol, but it's the lyrics of lead singer Aaron Stovall that give the fevers their contextual fortitude. It's in listening to what he's singing about - demons, the relevance of the record album as an art form, and people turned into machines, mostly - that we're allowed to enter some kind of weird, mystery world where the machines are as alive as people or perhaps more appropriately, the people are as dead and clanging as the machines, though they're able to straddle the line between the metal and the flesh. The minds that are walking about in a majority of the songs on the bands electric and eclectic new record, "The Loud Wars," are attached to wires and the situations - parties that are dead and full of dead-inside people who could care less if you were alive and there or not - that remind us pleasantly of The Dismemberment Plan's Travis Morrison screaming, "Red wiiiiire, left tentacle, black wiiiire, right tentacle…" and framing the vacant bodies as those to be avoided, the love would always come from elsewhere. It's a similar feeling with So Many Dynamos, who take their cues in places from the D Plan, rosining up their bows and firing shots into the hollow bodies, while making music that's highly conceptual and imaginative. There are hints at religious speculation when Stovall sings, "I signed up for the water and the wine, but I didn't sign up for the fire and the hail," giving terms to some of the general points of thought on the album. There's a battle with the inside of a whale and much of the material sounds as if it should be epic in proportion, though it deals with the very simple transformation of passionate people into impassionate people, even if there are minor tussles to fend off what is sometimes inevitable. When Stovall sings, "Get me out of this party, cause it's boring and so uneventful," on "Artifacts of Sound," there is a sense that a lot of times, no one gets out of that party. They just stay and the very literal mechanisms start kicking in.

So Many Dynamos Official Site
Vagrant Records

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