The German trio Mint Mind make smart music of the kind we'd call alt-rock. Their new album bristles with the kind of spiky indie we heard on records from The Young Knives and others in recent decades. Mint Mind, however, are more serious than those guys, and that seriousness carries over into the heavy riffs here.
Opener "Contemporary Jaguars" has a bit of the old Interpol about it, while "Excuse the Excuse" is a neat deconstruction of New Wave tropes. On "Gold Card Member" and "No Vision" other influences creep into the sound. Mint Mind are adept at somehow working up a racket that seems to owe as much to No NY pioneers as it does to Wire and Bauhaus (and Gary Numan on shameless "Down in the Park" homage "In the Sweet Land of Mint"). The riffs are heavy, yes, but there's a lightness to the overall presentation that makes this whole record fairly easy to digest. VG+ doesn't re-invent the wheel, but the things stitched together here make up the sort of noise that I find enticing, and which like-minded readers will too.
VG+ by Mint Mind is out now via Tapete Records.
[Photo: Conny Winter]