Stucco Thieves is the new LP by New York City's The Sediment Club. This new collection of nine songs marks 10 years since the band's formation in 2008. Stucco Thieves tells an abbreviated and frank series of human bankruptcy accounts from the post Pax-Americana perspective. The Sediment Club wrench and berate their instruments to make Stucco Thieves a concise, brutal landscape filled with tales that range from slapstick to cruel. Hapless characters embody greed, change form, and reflect on the crumbling infrastructure of a "cobalt ruin." Stucco Thieves holds our shared predicament of doom in the casual pass of a snarl, "a dungeon shook," and a dropped bag of dirt. Honey's chromosomes are dying fast, falling out of vogue, and turning to a "shadow soon." 

Our take: Latest LP from this long-running band from New York. I’ve seen them described on occasion as playing in a no wave style, though I’m not 100% sure I’d use that term. I’ve been listening to a lot of no wave-influenced music over the past few months (which you may have noticed if you read these descriptions regularly) and for some reason I’m inclined at the moment to think about what no wave is. I always thought before that no wave was music made by people who didn’t assume that traditional musical skill or talent were prerequisites for making interesting music, but a lot of the stuff I’ve been digging on lately—Sediment Club included—is quite complex and skillfully performed… I mean, try playing some of the stuff on the latest No Babies LP… that group can outplay any prog band you put them up against. Sediment Club aren’t nearly so flashy as players, but their music is still quite complex. More than that, though, it feels totally free, encompassing a very broad range of styles, tones, tempos, and textures over the course of this rather brief 45RPM 12”. Sure, some of it sounds like 80s Sonic Youth and there are some mutant funk vibes here and there (like the track “Hydraulic Saint”), but I get the distinct impression that those sounds aren’t there because Sediment Club want to sound like a vintage no wave band, but rather because those sounds were the best way to get across the ideas that they were trying to articulate. And maybe at the end of the day that’s the power of no wave. It isn’t that the musicians who play this kind of music dismiss skill or talent, but rather that they dismiss the rules and conventions that keep music in neat little boxes. Regardless of how you classify it, though, Stucco Thieves is a rich and varied LP that takes you to a whole bunch of different places, all of them very worthwhile.