The youthful Madison quintet’s sophomore album, Collector, has been issued by the same label acts such as Bright Eyes and Big Thief call home, Disq’s notoriety doesn't come only by association with already established and critically lauded acts. The group, with members all in their late teens to early 20s, proffer a sound encompassing a trippy folksiness to heavier, shambolic forays that feed as freely from doom metal as they do from post-punk.
Electronic and guitar effects accent Collector's 10 tracks about often as not, as if adding Greek chorus ejaculations of dissonance to singer/guitarist Isaac deBroux-Slone’s vocals. And though the band’s music videos posit them in comic scenarios reprising the Monkees’ sitcom high jinks and being the bar band at a rural snowmobilers’ tavern, deBroux-Slone’s lyrics are typically less than lighthearted. Amid (hyperbolic?) wishes for death, complaints of daily routines and self-assurances that loneliness is in ample supply, the tenderest and geekiest sentiments here may be directed toward a vintage microphone.
If that bit of technophillia isn’t typical of the generation of which Disq are part, much else of Collector’s discontent and ennui may be. If they grow from the articulate, inventive work already evidenced here, Disq will continue to do Wisconsin proud.
