Jumbling Towers: "Gilberta"

You’ve got to admire a lovingly released 7” of patient, finely honed indie that sounds how Destroyer should sound the day after Dan Bejar releases the most inflated piece of shit of the year, his Bay of Pigs EP. Jumbling Towers end up bittersweet—on the one hand they keep getting better through reduction rather than expansion, stripping away pretences and pretensions, allowing their melodies all the space and time they need, letting them breathe, allowing “Gilberta” to depend on its melodies’ fundamental strengths, and the song is downright graceful for it, professional even. But on the other hand, line up “Gilberta,” it’s three-and-a-half minutes of effervescent pop, next to “Bay of Pigs” and tell me that it doesn’t make you pine for an alternate-reality Bejar that hasn’t enjoyed the longest sustained critical blowjob in the world. Maybe Jumbling Towers benefit from being a smaller act, and I can’t guarantee that if their star were to ascend they, too, might not also opt to release a song comprised entirely of far too many minutes of ejaculate. But in the meantime we have a song in “Gilberta” that’s valuable not only because it’s good (and it is) but because it provides some much needed perspective: Jumbling Towers are solid, quirky fun. Destroyer is oblique, quasi-cerebral garbage. Go get yourself some Jumbling Towers.

:: Pre-order the 7” here