Anniversary

Formed in 1997 as the Broadcast, and renamed Anniversary after their only album Anniversary, the Kansas outfit fronted by Joshua Berwanger and Justin Roelofs and featuring keyboardist Adrianne Verhoeven re-debuted with Designing a Nervous Breakdown (2000), an album that flirted with both the revival of the new wave (thanks to the videogame-inspired keyboards) and to the emocore of the Get Up Kids (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter).

Your Majesty (Vagrant, 2002) indulged in bombastic and baroque arrangements that were more than psychedelic and progressive nuances.

After Anniversary split, Joshua Berwanger started an alt-country project, Only Children, that debuted with Change Of Living (Glurp, 2004), followed by the mediocre Keeper of Youth (2007).

Anniversary's two souls couldn't parted ways in a revealing way. If Joshua Berwanger followed his country-rock muse, Justin Roelofs launched White Flight, a wildly experimental project. White Flight (Range Life, 2006) is a cacophonous collage of disparate musical ideas that don't even try to coexist and make sense together. They simply pile up, one on top of the other, and be the listener the one to make sense of the Babelic confusion. The first two songs are misleading in their melodic simplicity. Now is a demented, heavily-arranged aria that sounds like a collaboration between VanDyke Parks and Syd Barrett Pastora Divine is a pastoral psychedelic singalong that Kevin Ayers could have concocted in the 1970s if backed by the Velvet Underground. By the third one, any pretense of logic begins to fall apart. The somnolent sparse blues Solarsphere is ripped apart by a roaring hard-rock riff and drowns in ambient-lysergic madness. The Condition and the jazz-electronic mayhem of Timeshaker evoke the anarchic psychedelic freak-outs of Red Crayola; while the disjointed chant with wah-wah organ of Oz Icaro and the brief exotic dance of Galactic Seed evoke the acid-folk eruptions of the Holy Modal Rounders, except that Roelofs employs a different generation of devices: breakbeats, digital noise, sound effects, vocal effects, non-rock instruments to conjure a sense of poetic detachment from anything that music is supposed to be. Roelofs ends the album in the tone that is more pensive and philosophical, and musically more convoluted, of Deathhands and The Secret Sound. His extreme message is the hyper-syncopated drum'n'bass and free-jazz hemorrage of Superconductor that ends with a cryptic whistle in a bed of crickets.