Blame Confusion

Montreal's Solids operate at one of two speeds: pretty fast, and stupid fast. The young duo's debut LP, Blame Confusion, is a gaussian blur, 37 minutes of speed limit violation, drawing equally on hardcore blister, dream-punk, and raucous cusp-of-the-1990s indie rock. But while Solids don't want for momentum, between their relentless propulsion and the billowing reverb that envelops much of Blame Confusion, they can sometimes lose the song amidst the static.

Drummer Louis Guillemette and singer/guitarist Xavier Germain-Poitras' two-men-and-a-pedal-board set-up has a kindred spirit in No Age; not the tense, peculiar No Age of last year'sAn Object, but No Age at their most purely tuneful. You might even hear Blame Confusion as a kind of correction to the aggressively experimental An Object; it's something like a No Age record without the ambient passages or the rhythmic left-turns. The occasional rhythmic disruption or burst of static notwithstanding, Blame Confusion mostly just goes, breathlessly careening through its 10 songs at a mostly breakneck clip.