Mascot

2015 debut album from the Ukranian guitar and drum machine noise makers. From Kiev to Kansas City, 20-something's the world over tend to traffic in the same sort of distractions from modern life: clothes, sneakers, cars, love. Mascot holds these things for what they are: fleeting diversions from the bleak realities of modern times and an increasingly uncertain political landscape. That the band composed, wrote and recorded Mascots eight songs in its hometown of Kiev only adds to their authority on the matter. As fluent in Jesus & Mary Chain's Psychocandy as they are with Sonic Youth and Big Black, Bichkraft is heavy, paranoid music with frenetic jams of dueling and weaving guitars, digitized howls, and amped up brutality and chaos, and even some undeniably pretty moments of love & decay.