When seven-inch singles include more than two songs, the music between the grooves is generally spasmodic and short—breakneck hardcore, blasting noise, bursting power-pop. But the three tracks on the debut release from Chapel Hill scene-vet sextet Some Army are more concerned with the romantic, slow-build-and-burn side of psychedelic rock than with loud entrances and quick exits. Both "Servant Tires" and "Fall on Your Sword" open as if amid a haze, with frontman Russ Baggett leading his new band through drifts that steadily escalate into squall. Languid and damaged, "Fall on Your Sword" twinkles politely before grinding through a web of noise and sustain, like a more delicate My Morning Jacket tune with a gnarled solo courtesy of Wilco's Nels Cline. On "Servant Tires," a bed of slide-guitar hum, keyboard glow and primal backbeat diligently builds into one final exhalation, putting Baggett's world-weariness momentarily to rest like a babe at naptime.
Though the other track, "Queens," lasts for just 49 seconds, it's a very telling instrumental interlude. Sitting between the single's two anthems, it betrays a band with album-length ambitions, or at least the smarts to treat the two halves of this debut as the foundation of a repertoire that's bound, like these songs, to bloom.
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