Each band in this collaboration (Macha and Bedhead, duh!) features a set of brothers, Matt and Bubba Kadane from the Bedhead, and Joshua and Mischo McKay from Macha. The four grew up together in Wichita Falls, Texas, had been in bands together in high school, and had always expressed an interest in a collaborative project, but time and geography had frustrated this desire. This project originated when Bedhead sent the outlines of songs - drums and guitars, primarily - to Macha, who then completed them. Sadly, this recording functions as Bedhead's epitaph, since the band broke up shortly afterwards. Macha prove admirable executors of Bedhead's estate, however. Macha's strength has always been its sense of texture and mood, while Bedhead's songs are sturdy enough to stand with or without fancy arrangements. To me, the CD sounds more like Macha than Bedhead (then, I'm less familiar with all of Bedhead's output) but with songs less dependent upon their arranging flourish. Macha's material sometimes gets by (very winningly, though) on its impressive and adventurous sense of tonal color, but here the tracks are solid enough that they'd work, although nowhere near as well, alone with guitar and voice. Similarly, the anomie afflicting Bedhead's music is intensified by Macha's palette, its colors saturating the medium and granting the songs a sort of hyperreality (or, much the same, surreality). The opening "Hey Goodbye" features cello, zither, and vibes atop its guitar/drums foundation, while "Never Underdose" puts its distorted guitars through a funhouse mirror reverb, doubled with vibes. "You and New Plastic" evokes Bedhead heroes Joy Division (they covered "Disorder" a few years ago) in an autumnal afterlife. The song's guitar and bass arrangement is very "She's Lost Control," but that song's tensely sprung rhythm and machine-tooled sonics are diffused and polished by less dry production and a wash of gently rolling xylophone notes. And by this point, the cover of "Believe" is notorious. The chorus's main melody is literally phoned-in, played on a touchtone telephone, and the vocal line is egregiously pitch-corrected: the song is simultaneously a parody of contemporary digital studio hyperreality and a demonstration that there was a barely breathing song beneath the suffocating weight of the god-knows-how-many megabytes coded into the hit version's arrangement. It may be that Macha fans will like this better than Bedhead fans, but anyone who loved either band should find fascination in how the two bands' approaches combine.

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