This EP is the first release from Tiffany Anders, who's sung with everyone from Mikes Johnson and Watt to Boyd Rice. Here, in addition to singing, Anders plays guitar, bass, and electric piano, the last of which is quite effectively used in a style thankfully quite distant from its better known habitation in fuzak shlock hell. As a guitarist, she has a fondness for spiky suspended chords, which she deploys artfully and sometimes with a fair degree of heaviosity. In fact, her arrangements sometimes remind me of the more odd and subtle Dinosaur Jr. songs (J. Mascis plays drums on a few tracks here), the ones arranged with tympani, mellotron, and bells, for instance. Combined with the murky guitarage, what we have is a sort of chamber grunge, as if the idea of grunge were moved far, far away from boneheaded, heroin-chic angst to a broader, more abstract and thought-provoking approach. Although the songs are well written, they're also a bit samey: they stick in my head, but I'm not sure which song I'm remembering, even after I've hit replay. And the closing track, "Gutted End," doesn't really need its wanking guitarage. If Anders can extend the range of her melodic ideas, her next release could be very good indeed.

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