REVIEW: BY THE END OF TONIGHT: MY MOM CAUGHT ME IN MY ROOM BEAT BOXIN' EP

Earlier this year, each member of By The End of Tonight released a solo EP, no doubt in tribute to the Melvins, whose individual 7”s will, for now until eternity, clog the dwindling half-shelf of single releases available at the SoundWaves on Montrose. Each of these gems, issued by Temporary Residence Limited, was pressed on one of those hilarious little 3” CDs that will never work in your car stereo, iMac or other suction-induction cd loading mechanism.

We start our week of reviews by looking at the My Mom Caught Me in My Room Beat Boxin’ EP, the three song release by rumbler of the fours, James Templeton. If you, as we were, hoping for a descent into Basses Loaded-style wickedness, accompanied by some OMG DOUG-E-FRESH beat-boxing, you will not get it. This entire EP contains not a single live instrument, owning over entirely to the use of synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines (a trend that carries through on the other releases in the series, though only here is there so total a retreat from the band’s signature sound palette).

Opener “Thou Art That,” in all its teasing glitchyness and delicate instrumentation, invokes an earlier, still listenable, phase of the Aphex Twin catalog. Typing and percussing along, it won’t let you nail down the beat for two long before chopping up the magnetic tape, throwing it in the air, and letting the splices lie where they may. It slides gently into the ambient “What Must and Shall Be”, an ethereal ambience that might accompany Decker gliding around the Tyrell skyscraper and other dark-as-gold structures doing his Blade Running thing and trying to decide if there should be a voice over to all the post-modern shelter-pr0n filling your screen at that particular moment. Oh snap, he fell asleep and dreamed of a unicorn (that cursed Skin Job)! Closing things out is the decidedly more upbeat “JQ10”, with forays into the sort of minimalist house territory that keeps Surgeon’s Counterbalance Collection on our go-to list for any time we wanna chill with a beat.

All told, Beatboxin is perhaps the most unexpected of BTEOT’s slate of 2007 releases, perhaps in part because it makes you wonder when the city’s most exhausting van-inhabitants have time to learn anything other than the instruments they are known for. Back in the day, we were fairly convinced that the release of the Outkast Speakerboxxx/The Love Below split would, once and for all, demonstrate that Big Boi is a street-wise, grit-rooted straight-up hustler and Andre 3000 the outer-space time-traveling player-hater player. It turns out, however, that they’re both from Mars. Beatboxin serves as a good introduction to the BTEOT ep series because it has the opposite effect. It totally destroys the idea that the individual members of the group are instrument wielding cogs that, when disengaged from the others, would spout out as best an approximation as they could make of the collective whole. We’re pretty stoked on that. Recommended.

MP3: By The End of Tonight - Thou Art That