Know Your Product: Creepy Murdle, The Little Things That Kill You (MT6)
Baltimore’s Creepy Murdle—bassist Anne Feinstein; her husband, guitarist/snarler Rich Feinstein; and drummer Clay Holland—might be MT6 Records’ most accessible signees yet. Sure, their macro-aggro crunch on debut The Little Things That Kill You comes cloaked a scrim of psychedelic bubblewrap; sure, Feinstein’s clipped, anarchistic dispatches seem to have been recorded via a busted CB radio. Yet there’s no denying the trio’s ear for a killer hard-rock hook or a dynamite punk-rock riff-worm; the chances of Creepy Murdle’s herky-jerky hurtle catching on beyond its home base seem far stronger than, say, Rosemary Krust, the Agrarians, or Needlegun.
“Ontro” slings bing-bong, effects pedal dissonance that devolves into melting tape machine sludge before “Of Mad Kings” emerges to knock doors from hinges: thorny, concussive guitars and no nonsense drums on a surging tear with something to prove and Rich Feinstein trying on a credible Billy-Corgan-in-1995 impression. Skim a few dollops of that starchy distortion off of snotty, three-chord “Sunshine”—Blur-in-Orange County wooooo-hoos and all—and you’ve got yourself a lost Fat Wreck Chords compilation track. “Email Bomb” pogos so frenetically through a vitriolic “eff spam” screed that you might get whiplash; while harried “Fifteen”—with it’s no-hope “Fifteen minutes and I’m already dead/ Fifteen minutes and it’s all in my head” refrain, infectious “nah-nah-nahs,” and keyboard jags—comes across, even with pauses for breath, as even more urgent.
But Little Things gets still more hectic, as the vocals for breakneck garage-y vamp “I Hate the Way The World Goes Round” seem to disintegrate halfway through, as they were sucked through an oscillator. Perhaps what’s most impressive about Creepy Murdle is how its moxie and adrenaline never flag over the course of this album’s 35 minutes; dollars to doughnuts there’s a lot more to come.
Creepy Murdle plays July 18 at the Hexagon. For more information visit hexagonspace.com.
