Hunches / Exit Dreams

In The Red

The Hunches are Portland's finest purveyors of cacophonous garage, delivering ragged-edged rock 'n' roll with such devastating hidden melody, one is left wondering how the band crammed such pop into the noise cavalcades. Having released two previous full-lengths, The Hunches are back with Exit Dreams, their third (and possibly final) album that captures their fiery live form on wax once more.  It's a veritable melee of vicious guitar savagery and lo-fi freak-out fugginess, the perfect follow-up to Hobo Sunrise--a raging riot of an album that leaves ringing ears, bloody mouths, and shot-to-shit synapses sizzling with amplified excess.  Not that Exit Dreams is a one-dimensional thrill. There's much more to The Hunches than simple shock bombast. Over the course of twelve tracks, the outfit navigates styles known to explorers of under-the-radar rock, each time twisting the tried-and-true into forms best-fitting their singular focus. This is The Birthday Party hijacking Big Star's Third and juicing adrenaline into their eyeballs; it's the give-a-fuck Velvets getting loose and pissing off the neighbors while The Wipers chuck stones at their windows; it's the top-up for the tinnitus that only just wore off some four years after the last time The Hunches rode through this town.  The Hunches might be departing us, but the four-piece are leaving with a bang sure to raze these walls to the ground. It's time to set fire to everything and dance inside the encircling flames, facing fate with a wicked grin.  "[The Hunches] blast extremely hard, post-core, thrash-noise chunklets into The Cramps' platonic framework, add vocal weirdness, strange raunch-ballad action, and really knuckle the whole mess into a bloody pulp. They even cover the Electric Eels' "Accident." And the result are one helluva beautiful wreck." --Mojo

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