What a lovely combination of things this Atlanta trio’s debut album is: a dash of starry-eyed retro-futurism, a whole lot of artfully misshapen post-punk invention, and perhaps something of a harking back to a lost ideal of left-of-the-dial college rock. The key elements are drummer Billy Mitchell’s straight-backed rhythms, subject to constant interruption by fluttery, hopscotch syncopations; Frankie Broyles’s guitar lines, which build from infernally catchy single-string twangs to gorgeous, arpeggiated fountains, with little rainbows of melody gleaming through the spray; the complementary boom and bump of Philip Frobos’s bass, and his faintly bizarro vocals (perhaps somewhere on the Jonathan Richman/Feelies/Embarrassment axis: “You have such nice glassware / Was I the first to stare / At your earring chandeliers / I want to grab on and swing”). This is not herky-jerky art-rock of the monochromatic, nervous-itch kind, but something more coloured-in, packed with fantastic choruses and blissful wigouts. And even if Omni’s peculiar rhythmic route-planning and tangled melodic threads might sound awkward at first, they soon carve grooves into your brain deep enough that it all starts to sound utterly natural.
