Minks – By the Hedge (2011)

Minks are a duo of shoegazers from New York and By the Hedge is their debut album. I’ve been on a bit of a shoegaze kick of late and I’ve found that many of these artists employ the shoegazing playbook to varying degree. Minks are among to most true to the genre, with guitars that ring and buzz at such a pitch that I have to keep the volume below a certain point lest they hurt my ears. The percussion and especially the vocals are buried way down in the mix—further than most bands I’ve heard—to the point where you can’t really tell what is being sung. It seems futile to try to focus on anything other than the guitars, and that’s fine because I sort of expect it with this genre.

The thing that bothers be about By the Hedge is that I felt that the band’s aesthetic kind of masked some dull songwriting. A lot of these songs are completely uninspired and just sort of plod along, hazily and murkily as they are meant to, but without any real personality to them. Tracks like “Kusmi,” “Our Ritual,” “Boys Run Wild,” and “Arboretum Dogs” are entirely skippable.

A few of these tracks are pretty catchy, most notably “Cemetary Rain” with its acoustic guitar strumming and vocals that can actually be understood. The single, “Funeral Song,” has a nice flow to it but I didn’t like the vocal effects in the verses. “Juniper” was also a pleasant listen, because I could hear the trade-off between male and female vocals and there was a degree of emotion there that I didn’t really get anywhere else on this album. The song felt very conversational, as if the two narrators (still can’t tell what they’re saying, but I might prefer it that way) have a good rapport.

So, there are moments of really tuneful shoegaze here, but these moments were very few and far between and not enough to make By the Hedge something I expect to listen to very often. This album is too much an exercise in shoegaze guitars and it really masks any melodies that these songs may offer, which sometimes weren’t especially interesting in and of themselves.