reviewed by: michael snyder for skyscraper

The band wastes little time getting down to business: after a 15-second intro of ominous droning, they launch into the up-tempo gallop of "Trauma." Every element of the band's sound --- guitarist Tim's frenzied strumming and soft falsetto, Matt's hard yet lopsided drumming and (most importantly) Ian's extremely distorted bass lines --- comes through louder and clearer than ever before. The song only needs two verses, two choruses and two minutes to make its point before ending. Although only three of Good Technology's 11 songs cross the three-minute mark, Electro Group makes every second count, as if they're just as anxious to play these songs as their fans are to hear them.

On Good Technology, the band dodges derivativeness by occasionally incorporating influences not normally affiliated with their sub-genre. Tim's acoustic guitar playing on "The Rule" imitate the mystical boogie of Led Zeppelin, and his dissonant chord voicings on "Bikini States" and "Hong Kong Blues" hark back to vintage Sonic Youth. Not to be outdone, Matt turns in some positively breakbeat-worthy drumming on standout track "August," and goes totally math-rock on us with the tricky meter changes of "Raise Your Head." Nonetheless, this is still a shoegaze album: the vocal harmonies and whooshing guitars on the coda of "The Rule" will take you on a Ride to Nowhere, and the whammy-bar histrionics on "Two Course March" are textbook My Bloody Valentine.

Where the album truly lives up to its title is in the growing confidence that Electro Group has developed in the studio: the musicianship is more confident, the production clearer and more detailed. The band gives the beautiful ballad "Minutes" a psychedelic tint by reversing the keyboards and coating the cymbals in tremolo. "Killer Bees" begins with an interlude of white noise and high-pitched slide guitars that ends up weaving itself in and out of the rest of the song. On "Periphery," Tim's voice is run through bottom-of-the-well reverb that makes his pleading lyrics ("Will you come home?/When will you come home?") even more heartbreaking.

Speaking of hearts, I have a theory that most great shoegaze songs are love songs buried in noise. Good Technology supports my theory by functioning as a sort of concept album about the dissolution of a relationship. Although the lyrics are simple, they cover every emotion from frustration ("I could have made you see/but you made it so hard"), isolation ("You've been living underground/It turned you upside down"), resignation ("You got tired of waiting/for me to move to notice you") to, ultimately, regret ("We have been wrong/To let it slip away"). I wouldn't know this, though, if the lyrics weren't printed in the CD booklet: as usual, Tim's vocals are placed beneath his guitars in the mix. Reading the lyrics, though, has enabled me to connect with Good Technology in a way that I couldn't with their previous work. Now I can let Electro Group into both my ears AND my heart; you'd be wise to do the same!

reviewed by: sean padilla for pressplayrecord

It's been 6 years since the bands last proper full-length album but they've kept quite busy via a series of 7" records, tours, an EP and other bands (including Rocketship and Holy Smokes). Is it possible to welcome back a band I didn't even know existed until three days ago? I listened to a lot of Rocketship in the latter part of the 1990's but in the pre-widespread-Internet days if a band wasn't putting out 7"s and albums constantly it was easy to assume they had just faded away or broken up. I haven't even thought about Rocketship in years and,needless to reiterate (but I will), I was just turned on to Electro Group three days ago by Mike from Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records. We were on the phone talking about new records and he was practically frothing at the mouth over Electro Group's newest album Good Technology. I think his exact words were "I want to call the label up and congratulate them on releasing one of the best records this year. It's that good." So, of course, I was completely intrigued and hunted it down.

In short, Mike was right. Good Technology is a killer album.

Utilizing the most convenient descriptor possible, Electro Group is a shoegaze band. The only problem is that every single touchstone band of the late 1980's-1990's shoegaze/dream-pop/noise-pop scene was impersonal, distant, mysterious and foreign. (Think: My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, et al.) Even when listeners were able to establish emotional connections with a bands music there was rarely a feeling that these were bands one could relate to on a personal level if only because the band personnel were always so doggedly out of reach. Unlike other pop bands, it always seemed as if the shoegaze bands were singing around the listener rather than singing to him. Although this certainly didn't diminish my love of those bands (and still doesn't) it remains, in my head at least, that "shoegaze" is inextricably linked with a certain amount of inaccessibility.

Which is why I find Electro Group confounding.

The songs on Good Technology are drenched in fuzzy reverb, killer amounts of melody and distorted bass lines. Every surface feature of this album screams "classic shoegaze" but when listening very closely through the headphones something else is happens. The band is invitingly smooth-throated on tracks like "Trauma", "The Rule" and "Raise Your Head." They defy the genre completely on the crystalline "Minutes". Even on the albums centerpiece (and easily one of the best tracks herein), the massive "Bikini States" Electro Group has an element all those other bands never had:

They sound like nice boys.

That is, one can imaging them sleeping on one's floor after a show or chatting around a table. I don't know them so I have no idea if this is true or not. (And, admittedly, "boys" is an intentional misnomer for a group who's members are all in their thirties.) But the point is that Good Technology has a distinct lack of cruelty that so many of the original shoegaze bands had. Which means the very term itself is in question. If the mood a music projects is just as vital as its instrumentation then it doesn't seem fair to saddle Electro Group with the shoegaze tag. If, on the other hand, we can open to a term up to new interpretation and, when using it, just sort of have a loose understanding of what we mean when we say it then it's probably OK. Electro Group certainly has the composition skills equal to Ride. I just got this album about 20 hours ago and have already listened to it 5 times through if that says anything for it's addictiveness.

And the whole point of this is not to endlessly pigeonhole, delegate and categorize a band who is simply making records they want to make. I'm not questioning the band. I'm questioning me and my own assumptions. And I'm very happy to have Electro Group as the soundtrack for my attempts at genre-busting.

reviewed by: Gordon Lamb for 24 hour party pooper

Underwhelming neo-shoegaze bands are a dime a dozen, but Electro Group—while they do owe the Boo Radleys and My Bloody Valentine a debt—first and foremost sound like Electro Group. Sure, they've got the thick layers of fuzzed-out bass and distorted guitar and semi-buried vocals, there's something punky about Electro Group; their songs are generally short, direct and driving rather than gauzy and dreamy. Melodically, they get in there and out of there without messing around, though their economy offers no less of an atmospheric payoff.

Guitarist-vocalist Tim Jacobson, bassist Ian Hernandez and drummer Matt Hull have been a band since 1994, but Ian and Tim go back even further. "Ian and I became friends over the Cure," Jacobson says. "'Lullaby' was the first song we played together. We were called Graham Cracker Cyclone." Hull, who was primarily a guitarist at the time, joined the band later on, shortly after he'd acquired a drum kit from an ex-roommate who'd slagged off on rent.

Electro Group are the kind of guys you want to sit around and drink beer with, but because of logistics (Hernandez now lives in Seattle), we made due with a conference call. A lot of what we discuss boils down to the dirty (and terribly unromantic) little secret of the underground music universe: sometimes it's the nitty-gritty stuff, like access to certain types of recording, that dictates what happens to a band and when it happens.

"When you record yourselves, it's a blessing because you can take as much time as you want...but it's a curse, because you do take as much time as you want," says Jacobson. "We were committed to recording with old-school tape machines...the songs on Good Technology were probably recorded within the span of a year, but the mixing took so long. Because every time you mix with a tape machine in a traditional mixer, you have to start over again. It's not like your computer, where it's saved."

Hernandez described the mixing board they used on A New Pacifica as "a big steaming pile of crap." (Indeed, the somewhat crappy sound quality of A New Pacifica is one of the things I love most dearly about it.) Good Technology sounds like the same old Electro Group, but better—literally. Over the years, the guys have greatly improved the quality of their recording and mixing, resulting in a less sludgy sound.

It contains songs the band has been playing live for years, but they are brighter, crisper. The glory of Good Technology is "Hong Kong Blues," a new mix that improves vastly upon the 7-inch version released by the band a number of years ago. After a goofy sing-song intro, out of nowhere the song bursts into overdrive, with a dizzying, crunchy guitars and growling bass. "Periphery" begins unassumingly enough, but after a few seconds sneaks into a beautiful chorus that balances the counterpoints of aggressiveness and loveliness that make Electro Group so appealing.

Words are not of utmost importance in Electro Group's musical universe, which is why I was surprised to see that Good Technology includes a lyric sheet. "I'm not a big fan of lyrics—I don't even know the words to most of my favorite songs," Jacobson says. "I try to make it coherent in a very vague way, but really I don't give a shit. I think it's cool that people read stuff into it or whatever, but it doesn't make or break the song for me."

With Hernandez in Seattle, the band has switched over to a long-distance songwriting and recording via computer. "We have much less defined roles," Matt Hull says. "I've actually played more guitar in the last six months we've been recording than I've played drums, Tim's got a lot of drums on some of the songs. We're all throwing down whatever sounds good."

When will we get to hear this new stuff? Experience has taught us fans not to hold our breath, but considering I've been listening to it multiple times daily with no signs of stopping, six years of Good Technology seems like not such a poor fate.

reviewed by: Sara Bir for bohemian.com

reviewed by: Stewart Mason for amg

reviewed by: indiepages