There's a perfectly practical reason the Kansas-based band Müscle Wörship uses umlauts in its name - to protect people who would rather not know about a particular sexual fetish. So a word of advice to those folks: Don't do an online search for the band without those umlauts!
But the combination of a somewhat-deviant punk-ish name and those metal dots (àla Motörhead) makes musical sense, too, as Müscle Wörship lives in the cracks between styles. There's the lean aggression of punk, the experimental complexity of post-punk, the general heaviness of metal, extensive use of the tremolo bar that sometimes recalls the signature guitar sounds of both My Bloody Valentine and Neil Young, alternative tunings that bring to mind Sonic Youth, a grunge-y emphasis on hooks and distorted melody, and even hints of emo in the vocals.
The magic is that - on Müscle Wörship's self-titled debut album from earlier this year - those disparate elements have been combined in a way that, against all odds, is nearly monolithic: 32 furious minutes of great and nearly great infectious hard rock. (And just to be clear: The whole record is 32 minutes.) The group's music has three very different methods of persuasion - forceful enough to grab you by the throat, accessible enough to suck you in, and intricate enough to get lost in. In that sense, the name is wholly appropriate: This is music that's all beautifully sculpted muscle.
The first two tracks of Centaur Noir's Rock the Hall are a study in contrasts. Lead track "Market Street" is a dusty piece of lonesome folk -- guitar, percussion, and a little harmonica under restrained twin vocals, one falsetto and one a hoarse croak.
