Ball of Wax 54 Songs: electric bird noise – “steve strong II”

I thought I’d open this review with a rumination on the meaning of the band’s name, but that can’t be done while listening to music like this. Or shouldn’t. What should be done is to block out all other sounds—all other external stimuli, in fact—and try to comprehend what’s happening in your ears.

“steve strong II,” the son, protégé, or doppelganger of one or both of two early-era professional wrestlers, enters your brain on a snare, hi-hat, and rim shot riff that is syncopated enough to trick itself into an alternate meter, with a few synthesized notes (distorted electric piano? Clavichord? Omnichord?) providing an offbeat. Both instruments anxiously await the opportunity to show the listener what they’ve got and they do it with barely-controlled abandon (probably not an actual thing). Over the next few minutes, the drums become more aggressive and the synths more drunk and disorderly—woozy, at any rate—until somebody is flipped from the ring and dropped into a maelstrom of frenetic percussion and increasing (and increasingly warped) polyphony, only to land on a bar-and-a-quarter of calm concrete floor.

For extra fun, listen to the track on repeat and wonder if electric bird noise hadn’t planned it this way from the start!