Noxious Foxes: Légs

Some sub-styles of rock are just limited by their own conventions (like any music with a "-core" tacked on). Enter Brooklyn-based Noxious Foxes and their sophomore effort Légs. It revels in the limitations of math rock, particularly because it does the work of four to five players with only two. Any rock duo has to use cold, calculating technology to sound like a bigger band; it might as well be math rock. Justin Talbott (guitars and keys) stacks looped textures over Richard Levengood's drumwork like an expert bricklayer on coke. Talbott is all sharp edges and clean work, his sounds becoming more kinetically pregnant with each measure. Levengood is along for the ride, but with his own frenetic insanity. It's like he's getting paid a dollar a hit. Across nine tracks, the two of them take us from sadness to panic to panicky sadness with a surplus of punny track titles. They're not interested in making the changes smooth or the melodies legato. This album is a never-ending, unpredictable jazz breakdown programmed by voiceless, funky androids. It's actually pretty okay, a curio for most and a sloppy hummer with plenty of eye contact for the genre's devoted.