Drag City
It takes a certain sort of talent to put together a double album with no merit whatsoever but San Francisco’s Sic Alps have completely succeeded the feat — Napa Asylum isn’t worth the plastic it’s pressed on and with an extremely bloated 22-song track list simply put it’s not worth your time.
The songs of Napa Asylum range between third-rate Velvet Underground aping to aimless guitar rattle with token lo-fi guitar feedback and cheap “oh-oh” garage hooks in the background. The production is intentionally lazy the songs go nowhere the hooks are unvaried and worst of all there’s this awful “we’re a cool band” self-awareness to the whole album that suggests that Sic Alps might be aiming for some sort of Royal Trux Twin Infinitives sort of ineptitude. There are four things that tie these 22 songs together: They’re homogenous tuneless listless and completely pointless.
Sic Alps sound bored but its members sure aren’t genius slackers — rather they just don’t seem to care. So why should anyone else? Lo-fi garage rock is already an oversaturated (shallow) pool — consider Napa Asylum the crowning achievement of the most embarrassing contemporary trend in indie rock.
