Left of the Dial	Centro-Matic/South San Gabriel: Dual Hawks by Donny Kutzbach

Centro-Matic/
South San Gabriel
Dual Hawks
(Misra)

As if it weren’t enough that a sprawling and masterful split double album from Denton, Texas’ indie savants Centro-matic and that band’s dark-spun, psych-country alter-ego South San Gabriel entered the world last week. A piece in the Dallas Observer heralding the twin record’s arrival also reports that Centro/SSG front man Will Johnson has three separate collaborations due: a pairing with Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood, one with Jason Molina of Magnolia Electric Company, and possibly something with a hip-hop crew called PPT. The mindbending part of it is not so much imagining so widespread a creative outpouring but the fact that Johnson still has it overflowing on the heels of releasing the perfectly crafted Dual Hawks.

This marks the first time that these two bands have shared a record beyond a split EP, and the timing was clearly right, as evidenced across Dual Hawks’ 23 tracks. As the title suggests, each is equally fierce and powerful but certainly two distinct parts. Centro-matic’s Hawk finds able meandering through passages of fuzzy, harmony-laden, experimental rock, grafting Guided By Voices and Crazy Horse without necessarily sounding much like either. The second is an exercise of South San Gabriel’s veritable reflex muscle for creating hazy, widescreen tone poems where events, characters and certainly emotions beautifully blur from one song to the next.

While Johnson might be seen as the engine of these two bands, he certainly isn’t the whole machine; the other members add their unmistakable and invaluable fingerprints to the music. Centro-matic systematically tears through the wall with the understated brilliance of “Rat Patrol and DJs,” as the irrepressible rhythm section of bassist Mark Hedman and drummer Matt Pence stay steadily together while Johnson and keyboardist/vocalist Scott Danbom intertwine vocal lines perfectly. There’s so much going on, yet the pervading sense of simplicity strikes home. It has a warm, shaggy and lo-fi feel, but the recording and playing sound so precise and well planned. And Centro-matic don’t ever drop their guard here. “Every Single Switch” is tempered melancholy with Johnson’s whining, winding guitar and Pence’s snare hitting like a heartbeat. Johnson and Danbom slyly bemoan speaker stacks, bad radio frequencies, and saccharine songs that can kill across the spiraling mini-epic “Remind Us Alive,” while the gloriously “Strychnine, Breathless Ways” is a chaotic, smack-in-the-chops bit of pop coming in a compact, under-two-minute package.

South San Gabriel’s sepia-toned majesty leaves no white space on their part of Hawks, which opens in the soft, string-filled dream of “Emma Jane” and steadies the mellow perfection throughout. The stutter beat and reverb-drenched “When the Angels Put Out Their Lights” sounds like it could fit on either of Neil Young’s downbeat/down-and-out masterpieces Tonight’s the Night or On the Beach, and the surreal folk of “Senselessly” is a showcase for Johnson’s tenor that needs little more than Hedman’s commanding bass and some guitars trading off light picking and gentle feedback.

The beauty of Dual Hawks is that it never descends. In almost an hour and a half of song, there are no lulls. It’s a remarkable record, Make that two.

—donny kutzbach

Centro-matic and Chicago’s the Ms—who also have a great new record, Real Close Ones (Polyvinyl)—share the stage at the Mohawk Place this Tuesday, June 10.