RIBS's 'COLD RIBS' Is a Post-Punk Record Built Backwards, and It Works Beautifully
RIBS make records in an order most bands don’t. Bassist David Mueller, drummer Josh Germeroth and guitarist Finn Cohen build the instrumental pieces first — experimental, unsupervised, worked out as music before anyone thinks about a song — and then hand the results to Mike Wallace, who writes the vocals and the lyrics onto whatever he’s been given. COLD RIBS, out August 21st on Three Lobed Recordings, is the second album made that way, and the process has stopped being an experiment and started being a style.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Mueller and Germeroth are the engine, and they get to drive. “I’m allowed to play a lot of different styles and push boundaries, and no one pushes back,” Germeroth told WUNC. “It’s very much encouraged to come up with the craziest thing you can think of, and then work back from there.” You can hear that permission in the record’s shape — the rhythm section isn’t holding a floor for a singer, it’s proposing the whole building.
The Spatial Dynamics: The range is wider than the band’s own reputation suggests. Raven Sings the Blues, calling the album “more dynamic than the average post-punk wrecking ball,” singles out the piano on “Paperwork” and the acoustics and harmonies on “In The Rushlight” — two moves you don’t expect from a record that also, per the same review, “hits like a sack of rocks to the small of the back.”
Standout Performance
Wallace, in the strangest job in the band. He’s writing to finished music rather than steering it, and his “speak-sung quips” — Raven Sings the Blues again — land like someone narrating a room he walked into halfway through. It’s a constraint, and he treats it like an instrument.
Why It’s Certified
The titles alone tell you the humour is intact: “Decomp In The Field,” “Not A Boogie,” “Medicine / Medicisn’t,” “High Fives Of The Four Horsemen.” Mueller framed the leap plainly to WUNC: “The first record was more about finding out what that sound was. After playing together for a couple of years now, things are starting to come out of the factory looking like a RIBS song.” That’s the whole album in one sentence. They play the hometown release show at Lump Gallery in Raleigh on August 29th with Pipe and Cor de Lux. Certified great.