Intelligence / Deuteronomy

In The Red

If musicians painted images with their instruments, The Intelligence’s soundscapes would be set in a grainy, ash-gray world, among piles of scrap metal and busted machinery, with discarded computer parts blinking in cobwebbed corners and factories belching out toxins at irregular intervals. It’d be a black-andwhite wasteland of humanity, a post-apocalyptic industrial revolution, warmed only by the distant loops of a delayed, disembodied guitar riff. At the center of it all would be Lars Finberg, delivering deadpan lines like “Going out with you is like going out with a cop.” He’d be pounding bent garbage-can lids with one hand and programming distorted beats on his keyboard with the other, a one-man laboratory of intoxicating post-punk experimentation.  The music is so jagged and cinematically poetic and dusted in clouds of lo-fi noise that listening to it at different times can conjure completely different visions. It’s par for the course for Finberg, who has participated in some of Seattle’s most exciting musical forces such as the A-Frames and The Dipers. The Intelligence are demanding attention in and beyond the Northwest, creating a new direction in sound based on the fundamental elements of bands like The Fall and PiL, yet beneath the post-punk clang lies a serious pop sensibility.  These pop chops have never been more noticeable than on Deuteronomy, the band’s third full-length. Finberg swears that The Zombies’ Odyssey and Oracle as well as early Bee Gees albums influenced his direction, though it sounds like Here Come The Warm Jets might’ve had a hand in it as well. Finberg also chose, for the first time, to forego the home recording approach he’s used in the past and employed the use of Mike McHugh and his Distillery recording studio to get the most full-bodied, fully realized Intelligence recording to date.

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