They must be putting something funny into the water in Chicago. Who knows how they do things over there, but anywhere else, if you put out an album that’s nine songs long and this good, it’s not an EP and it’s certainly not a band’s debut release. But that’s what we’ve got in Apteka’s Tour EP: an impossibly polished essay into Brit-inflected psychedelica with a touch of the epic. You could put Tour up on your record shelf right between the Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine without blinking an eye. Heady stuff.
There’s a focus to the album as a whole that you rarely hear in debut releases. Apteka knows exactly what it wants to sound like and knows exactly what it needs to do to make that happen. Jangly, phosphorescent guitars race alongside ferocious rock drumming while the lead vocals, double, triple, quadruple-layered for a giant chorus effect, raise the most banal lyric to the level of messianic revelation. "The Sheet" and "It’s a Wilderness…" are absolutely monstrous compositions; you feel as if you’ve been dropped into the cockpit of a fighter jet as the world screams by. This is Apteka in their Zooropa mode: huge, arena-ready anthems that barely ever stop to catch their breath. The constant adrenaline rush will begin to wear you down towards the end of the album, but the fun is outstanding while it lasts.
On "If You Were Here", "Edie Sees", and "Where You Sleep", Apteka takes it down a notch. The tempo slows and the lead vocals quiet to a whisper over scattered storms of feedback and drone for a beautiful Jesus & Mary Chain ambience. After the hurly burly arena rock, these songs are welcome digressions into a more reflective mode (or just an opportunity to grab a beer or take a piss if you’re at a live show). It’s a bit like dropping into first gear all the way from fifth though. If there’s one place where Apteka shows room for improvement, it’s probably in terms of finding a middle ground between the adrenaline anthems and the more laidback moods. But these subtleties come with time and you’ll be hard pressed to find a more accomplished debut EP than Apteka’s Tour. If you can shrug off the (almost) unpardonable sin of a faux-British accent, you may have found a real keeper in this foursome from the Windy City.
MP3 Stream: "Edie Sees"
