Thom Waddill, frontman of Austin rock quintet Font, summons his lyrics in semi-conscious fits of instinct. Dream recall and automatic writing; scrawled poems and nonsensical muttering. Waddill seems to live among towers of haphazardly stacked pages—Cormac McCarthy essays and dog-eared Dostoevskys—clipping from them like a scissor-happy kid. The angular, polyrhythmic outbursts from his bandmates are just as reflexive, often built from the drums up during improvisatory practice sessions. On their debut album, Strange Burden, Font fuse grimy post-punk guitar, combustive percussion, and blazing synth riffs, committing roughly three years of evolving live sets to tape. They lose nothing in the process. Strange Burden is meticulous and crackling—a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning.
Font is populated by multi-taskers; most members dart between strings, synthesizer, or a sampling pad at any given moment. During gigs, bassist Roman Parnell and guitarist Anthony Laurence swap machinery with Waddill at the front of the stage, while Font’s two drummers, Jack Owens and Logan Wagner, dish out dueling rhythms in the back. Wagner stands while performing, and of course, also plays a sampler. This kind of dexterity only aids Font’s teeming arrangements, which dissect and reanimate a pile of hyphenated genres. But trying to identify Font’s music is a slippery business; post-punk, art-rock, dance-punk, noise-pop…they are all accurate but insufficient descriptors.
Font have been pretty up front about their influences: Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, and Radiohead have all been name-checked. But they are also channeling the warped disco of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, James Chance’s agit-jazz, and prog fuckery à la Squid and Black Midi. Font’s earliest singles are stirring and pushy. “Sentence I” is a twisted punk sermon spurred by Parnell’s elastic bass licks and Wagner’s thwacked cowbell. On “It,” Waddill contorts his voice between breathy yelps and ragged shouts, as Laurence’s guitar screeches like a circular saw gnawing through steel. The song is an early instance of Waddill’s absurdist humor:
It comes through the body
It opens the door
It crawls up my leg while my mom’s at the store
It insults my dad
It calls out for God
It suns on the deck with abandon
This faceless “It” is at first menacing, suggesting some kind of hostile, inhuman species. But the sudden swerve into a grocery store, and then a porch chair where “It” tans “with abandon,” feel like cockeyed portraits of the mundane. Most of Font’s songs modulate tension in this way, and Waddill is keen to conjure hyper-specific, mismatched visuals—as if he’s playing a solo round of Exquisite Corpse.