Icebox Records

Here’s what they said over at Seven Days:

SCHOOL BUS, PAINLESS
(Ice­box Records, IB3-001 3-inch CD)
School Bus’ lat­est effort is the inau­gural release of a 3-inch CD series from Burlington-based Ice­box Records. Mas­ter­mind and multi-instrumentalist Jason Coo­ley, a.k.a. School Bus, has pre­vi­ously flirted with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of groove-based, sample-heavy elec­tron­ica. On Pain­less, how­ever, he sets aside the drum machine to craft an album of gor­geous, guitar-based drones. Although it clocks in at only 20 min­utes, Coo­ley estab­lishes a hyp­notic rhythm through the gen­tle ebb and flow of ethe­real hums and clicks. Sam­pled voices waver in and out as the brief tracks rise and fall, gelling together into a uni­fied whole. Yet Pain­less is not mere bliss-out blur. Just as cer­tain notes seem to bring waves of chill, a storm of sta­tic fuzz crack­les through. Pain­less is a tex­tu­rally thrilling doc­u­ment of mod­ern drone, a sat­is­fy­ing jour­ney indeed.

- ETHAN COVEY