wouldbe records

You leave the oppressive lights of the city behind—or maybe its just another dead strip mall in your rearview mirror—and you head to the mountains with visions of peace, solitude, quiet.  But as you start winding down the back roads that serve as your path you feel a new terror, a new discomfort.  The shadows loom, the trees bend over the road like fingers reaching for you, tugging at you.  You had hoped to escape.  But from what? Into what?  You realize that even in that darkness and solitude, even in the steady rhythm of the tire tones, there is something scurrying, something breathing, something crying out that makes that vision of solitude in your head impossible to replicate.

Perhaps what you hear is The Replication Crisis, a new indie rock project founded by Ryan Ceresola (Jump the Shark) and Ben West (The Sundown Professor). 

Nestled somewhere in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, their songs offer fantasies of escape, scenic drives with nothing but death on the horizon, urging you to get away, to try the back roads, or even the woods, baiting you with their mystical oil and promises of escape, promising presents as big as the moon, urging you to leave him, to leave the law, to just leave. 

With a mix of jangly acoustic canvases and high gain, pedal-infused guitar screeches, The Replication Crisis get you moving just enough to think that you have gotten away, danceable bass patterns and funky wah-riffs making you forget, for three minutes at a time, that the vision you had in your head for your life is not reproducible.