The December Sound - Silver Album (2007)

Zack Sarzana, the December Sound's singer-guitarist, brightens when his band of psychedelic-minded post-punks gets compared to outfits like the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. But he positively shines when friends and fans tell him that the foursome's self-titled debut also seems to pull from rap and hip-hop's past.

"Some people have listened to [the album] and told us that it sounds like Eric B. & Rakim - and here we were thinking we were so psychedelic," says Sarzana, laughing over the phone from Brooklyn, where he moved two years ago after spending his first 26 years in Boston. "But that's cool, because that's what I listened to growing up - those guys, the first Public Enemy album, early Beastie Boys, all that stuff. So it's a good fusion."

Fusion. It's an aesthetic and an approach that Sarzana, 28, has embraced and applied to both the way he listens to and makes music. And it's part of the reason why the December Sound's album - which the band will celebrate with a show at T.T. the Bear's Saturday - sounds so good. The debut veers from cool stealth to chiseled soundscapes to drowsy space-age atmospheres. One moment you're Slowdiving into an ether of echo ("Reminder"); the next you're flanked by beats hard enough for a strobe-lit dance floor ["Kill Me (Before I Kill You)," a track that first appeared on the band's 2005 EP of the same name]. The fuzz-toned guitar assault of "Maker," the album's most brutishly aggressive rocker, sounds like what might happen if Spacemen 3 covered the Stooges - or dosed Iggy's crew with LSD.

"I tend to listen to so many different types of music, and I try to write in a full spectrum," Sarzana says. "I think there are a lot of different sounds on there."


Tracklist:

01. Never
02. No Heaven Like Hell
03. Drone Refusenik
04. Do You in
05. Painkiller
06. Reminder
07. 12
08. Kill Me (Before I Kill You)
09. Maker
10. Il Forte
11. Truth Hurts
12. Tape Tape
13. Not if It's on Your Time
14. Hidden Track

Click here for album sampler.