At this point I can’t remember what turned me on to Golomb, the trio out of Columbus, OH that somehow manages to sound like Kevin Shields was behind the boards for The Beat Goes On, the band’s sophomore LP. It’s a new release, although you’d be more than forgiven for thinking this came out alongside albums by The Breeders and Velocity Girl in the 90s; it has that exact vibe: loose and grungy with fuzz, doubled vocals, and a real knack to carve out sweet melodic hooks underneath the shoegaze heavy distortions. It’s not without a few missteps, but even those missteps add to the album’s overall charm.

There’s a real chemistry between members that helps to make the woozy, gauze-wrapped sound mesh and expand to fill my head with dreamy reminiscences of my college days. I suspect bass/vocalist Xenia Shuman and guitarist/vocalist Mickey Shuman are intentional in that regard: dating since their teenage years (now married) and both enamored of the Columbus music scene, they find a way to craft songs that are evocative of the Midwest scene in a blend of time periods, sounding both vintage and modern. The opening title track plugs in with a squeal of feedback and noise until drummer Hawken Holm brings the band in with his toms. It then gets gnarled in a swirl of fuzz as the Shumans put their voices together to ring out the verses. Mickey’s guitar sounds great, alternating between chiming edge-of-breakup chord strumming and quick licks that color the song.

It’s all prelude, though, to The Beat Goes On‘s single “Staring” which sounds so much like My Bloody Valentine decided to go full pop it boggles my mind. It’s one of my favorite songs of the year, and probably spurred the increasing amount of spins Loveless got over the last few months. I absolutely love the guitar melody. Mickey takes a solo vocal on “Experience Humanness” over a looping rhythm and its dissonance and wandering tonal center lilts and keens in dizzying fashion. It brings up one small issue I have with the album, and that’s its sequencing. Maybe I’m old-school, but I like the way bands in the 80s would front-load albums with big songs and ideas to rope the listener in, and then slowly get more experimental and varied further in the album. Would the album be better had band swapped “Experience Humanness” with “Pressure”, the next track with its big swing hooks in the chorus? In a similar vein, would the odd, detuned reggae swing of “Other Side Of The Earth” make a solid closer with its collapse into studio laughter at the song’s end?

Those are things I keep thinking about when I listen to The Beat Goes On; it doesn’t mar my enjoyment and love of what the band does. “Dog” sounds positively huge; the guitar break is stellar and sounds so thick you can see the notes like a stream of purple light angling in exotic peaks and valleys. “The Sad Song” lives up to its name thanks to Holm’s lurching rhythm and Xenia’s voice, feeling drunk and struggling to step after step, almost but never quite falling. There are some real sweet songs wrapping the album up, like Mickey’s second solo outing on “Play Music”. By the time of the country-tinged “Sweet Release (Ain’t No Devil) with violin and saxophones it sounds like Golomb are just starting to break into a wider world of influences.

Based on this, I can’t wait.