Muuy Biien D.y.i. (Do Yourself In)

Last year's This Is What Your Mind Imagines featured a bunch of teenage boys about to go off. Like early Huesker Due, it bypassed conventional notions of melody and headed straight for pure anger. Nevertheless, every paper in Athens put MUUY BIIEN on the cover. For D.Y.I. they're going to need to build them a goddamn statue. Only a year on from their debut, Muuy Biien have undergone an evolution nearly as startling as the primordial fish that grew lungs and crawled onto land. It's a band that is about to make the lazy comparisons of the past--to Savages, to Iceage, to Joy Division, to The Fall--seem ridiculous. It may be all anger & brutality on the surface, but there's a pop sensibility at its heart, a buoyancy that TIWYMI lacked. That album was a pure laser beam of black & white rage, but D.Y.I. finds the band slowing down every so slightly and allowing things into the songs--melody, vulnerability, dynamics, hooks--that up till now you had to look closely to find. Muuy Biien is the real thing. No college degrees, no connections, no future. Kids in their 20s raised in the Georgia countryside, born to work in fast food--the band members met while all working at fried chicken chain Raisin' Cane's, eventually moving in together like some kind of white trash Monkees.