Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

Devastations --- and I’m not being critical, here --- is weird. The trio --- Tom Carlyon, Hugo Cran, and Conrad Standish --- are originally from Australia but don’t expect the second coming of Midnight Oil or AC/DC. Devastations’ music --- dark, languid, murky --- is reminiscent of Nico’s work, particularly with the Velvet Underground. Yes, U is their third effort, and is a beautiful, haunting work, stark in its execution and quietly frightening.

Devastations sounds nothing like Morphine, but if you were over at someone’s apartment and thumbing through their CD collection, it would follow that they would have both bands well-represented in the bookcase. There is a decadent edge to Devastations, one which is a bit off-kilter, to say the least. Black Ice is a gossamer thread of a song, which leaves the listener wondering when, and if not, the narrator will jump off the ledge, while Rosa sounds like the mind poem of a psycho killer declaring his love with a chainsaw. The rest of Yes, U is somewhere in between --- though leaning toward the quieter side --- with a tension that never quite lets up. While their compositions, written by Carlyon and Standish, adhere --- just barely --- to conventional song structure, it is what is contained, quietly squirming therein, that is unsettling. As Sparks Fly Upward is a good example. It appears to be an instrumental, and is, for all intents and purposes, until near the end when a couple of lines are sung. An Avalanche of Stars sounds as if it could have been an outtake from Leonard Cohen’s SONGS FROM A ROOM, with Bryan Ferry contributing. When the lyric “let’s go out tonight” is sung, you want to hide your daughters. The image I keep getting as I listen to Yes, U is of a playground on a rainy day. There aren’t any children around, but there’s blood on the sliding board. And The Saddest Sound… it begins, like Cohen’s “The Master Song,” with a solitary guitar, but sounds not unlike Eric Anderson’s “Sheila” without copying it note for note.

Yes, U is hardly commercial, but each track in its unique way is memorable and recognizable. Even Miserichordia, the discordant keyboard solo which (almost) closes Yes, U, is as memorably endearing as it is grating, giving way to the static of a jet plane. Or is that a vacuum? Or a bus? It probably doesn’t make a difference. Oh yeah, there is a hidden track, Mistakes, a charmingly commercial track that doesn’t sell out at all --- you really have to hear it in context with the rest of Yes, U --- that could be an alternative radio hit. I think they did it just to show they could. Devastations isn’t just thinking outside of the box, they’re outside of the room that the box is sitting in.