Build With Erosion

Album Review

The Berg Sans Nipple sing, shuffle, and splice their way through Build with Erosion, the band’s third collection of unhinged dance music. Like the albums before it, Erosion is a depository for the duo’s varied interests in electronica, dub, hip-hop, Afro-beat, and minimalist world music. Keyboard hooks are poked and prodded until they hardly resemble their source material, and they’re looped against a backdrop of samples and skittering percussion. The result recalls a mix of early Animal Collective, Yeasayer, and the Ruby Suns’ electro-tropicalia effort Fight Softly, and Shane Aspegren strengthens those similarities by singing on most of the songs. The Berg Sans Nipple have traditionally been an instrumental duo, though, and they rarely let Aspegren’s baritone stand on its own. His vocal tracks are chopped up, put back together, sped up, slowed down, and slathered in digital effects, with harmonies and Fela Kuti-type chants thrown into the mix. As a result, Build with Erosion still feels like an instrumental dance record, with the vocals serving a similar role to the accompanying instruments. And there are lots of other instruments involved, running the gamut from traditional to tribal, organic to synthesized, recorded to sampled. Build with Erosion casts a wide net, but its 11 songs still cast a consistent mood, falling somewhere between pleasantly hypnotic and purposely peculiar.