Today, the Onion AV Club's Loud column featured a track, "Rising Artifacts in a Five-Point" field alongside new tracks by Napalm Death and Pallbearer!
Here's what they said:
"A far more technical band—albeit surprising loose and free—is Many Arms. Released on John Zorn’s Tzadik imprint, the trio’s instrumental, self-titled full-length is appropriately restless and challenging; its three extended tracks (all near or over the 15-minute mark) reconfigure drums, bass, and guitar into inverted hierarchies, semi-improvised explorations, and mood-enhancing injections of feedback. It sounds batshit nuts at first listen, but the longer you allow your brainwaves to sync up with it, the deeper you’re drawn into its pulsing, puzzle-like, and otherworldy nightmare-logic."
Head over to the AV Club site to hear the track and see the entire column.
The Philadelphia City Paper gave us a really nice review in this week's issue, which is the music issue.
Here's what they said:
Many Arms, Many Arms (Tzadik)
Nick Millevoi is Philadelphia's shred king of the six-string. Though this potent and dexterous improvisational guitarist has executed Hassidic punk (in Electric Simcha), delicate 12-string soundscapes (as a solo artist) and clammy avant-garde jazz (in Archer Spade), Millevoi makes his most insurgent music with Many Arms. Electric bassist John DeBlase, drummer Ricardo Lagomasino and Millevoi prove to be a rushing power trio not unlike Cream: gruffly epic and eerily informed by jazzed psychedelia. The 13-minute-plus "Rising Artifacts in a Five-Point Field" shows off the threesome's greasy grandeur at its finest. In the soft hands of guitarist and producer Eric Carbonara, Many Arms goes beyond the usual demands of crusty improv-jazz-punk to find something bad and beautiful on its Tzadik debut. —A.D. Amorosi
Check out the whole thing on the City Paper's site.
And last week we got a really nice review for our last album, Missing Time, from the blog Killed in Cars in a piece about us, our good friends Hyrrokkin, Scorch Trio, and Hedvig Mollestad Trio.
Here's what they said:
Many Arms - Missing Time
I wasn’t familiar with Many Arms until I picked up their 1st self-released disc “Palabras Malas” at the merch table of a Zevious show (bassist John DeBlase capably serves in both bands). Zevious, by the way, is another excellent power trio with two good albums and a truly great live show. But I think I like Many Arms even more: for me, this band reaches to the top tier of thoughtful and visceral power trio music, and deserves to be celebrated with classic trios like Blind Idiot God and Massacre.
Many Arms splits the difference between Hyrrokkin and Scorch Trio on the composition-to-improvisation continuum. Songs are mostly composed, but many feature intensely high energy solos. And they really excel at both. Compositionally, this music nods to math, prog, drone, psych, jazz, thrash, and more contemporary NYC scenes without bursting at its seams. In terms of playing and soloing quality, the whole band can exhibit an almost punishing display of technique, but they pull it off without turning into “shred” music. Nick Millevoi’s guitar playing in particular floors me. He can spin endless jazz lines or angular stabs of sound with a particularly assertive picking technique. He’s not much of a legato player, but I’ve never heard picking articulation that so effectively demands attention. This is a guitarist to watch carefully. He also recently released a powerful 12-string electric solo record on New Atlantis that I’ll be covering in the near future.
Though John DeBlase is the least flashy performer in Many Arms, maintaining structure when the guitars and drums go wild, he writes a lot of the band’s music, and he gets an especially satisfying fuzz bass workout on the epic “Enfolded Within a Great Flow.” And drummer Ricardo Lagomasino sounds comfortable in every stylistic context he tries, from jazz to blast beats. He’s especially inventive when shifting accents and densities over ostinato bass figures, a technique that makes “Extraction” rock both weirdly and hard. That approach is also responsible for my favorite section on their “Palabras Malas” album, the outro of “The Year 500 Billion.”
“Missing Time” is available from Engine Studios, but also be sure to check the Many Arms BandCamp page, where you can find all of their music. And stay tuned in March—Tzadik Records is set to release the third Many Arms full-length, followed by some April tour dates with Hyrrokkin.
Head over to Killed in Cars to see the original.
