Album Review: Murder Shoes - Sleepwalker

What are ‘Murder Shoes’?

Well, it sounds like the kind of shoes you would either wear when you are a) being murdered, or b) murdering someone.

On both accounts, you would be wrong—it’s a post-punk band from the Twin Cities area, and they’ve just released their full-length debut, Daydreaming, via Land Ski Records, home of The Persian Leaps.

And it’s worth mentioning that Persian Leaps gawd Drew Forsberg hit me up and asked me to take a listen to this, even though he knows I have a strict “no new friends” policy right now with submissions for this blog.

The short story is that the 90s are alive and well and thriving on Daydreaming—it’s a snarling, bratty, poppy, and ominous nod to a time and a sound that we are so very nostalgic for right now. Frontwoman Tess Weinberg coos, swoons, and barks (and also meows) her way through the album, alternating between a Tanya Donelly-esq voice when she sings, and a post-Kim Gordon kind of scowl when she shouts.

Musically, there’s a lot going on here—with guitarists Derek Van Gieson and Chris White pulling from myriad influences and genres—the most notable being dream-pop and post-punk, which you can hear in the driving bass rhythms as well as the jangling guitar work. But stylistically, the duo manages to blend in other sounds too—including a 1960s girl group aesthetic, and even a little bit of country AND western.

It sounds like it may come off as a hot, unfocused mess once committed to tape, however, the band somehow incorporates all of that, and more, together seamlessly to make a sound that is both familiar, nostalgic, yet refreshingly relevant—something that is evident in the incredibly somber, shoegazey twang of the album’s opening track, “Your Friend Kimmie.”

Daydreaming is also an album that isn’t afraid to show its sense of humor—referencing Freedy Johnson’s “Bad Reputation” in a sleepy, quirky shuffle that shares the same name; also, in the same song, Weinberg straight up asks someone if they smoke weed, something that’s revisited later on the aptly titled “Pizza and Refer.”

She also states plainly that something, “fucking sucks” in the feedback laden “Little Lost,” and then goes on to meow in one of the songs. I wasn’t joking about that before.

Overall, Daydreaming is a solid release from start to release, but there are moments that are exponentially more successful than others—the aforementioned “Your Friend Kimmie” is an incredibly slow burning opening track, and the acoustic guitar driven rhythm that powers “Ninteeneightyone” into a gigantic, swoony moment, casts it as one of the catchiest, most accessible of bunch, rivaled only by the cinematic, dream-pop pleadings of one of the final tracks, “Can You Sea Me.”

Somehow cohesive in its restlessness, Murder Shoes have crafted a gorgeous debut full-length that shows a band unafraid of wearing its influences on its sleeves, and what’s more impressive—a band unafraid of making those influences into something all their own.

Daydreaming is out on Friday via Land Ski.