Sightings is composed of a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer -- just like a normal rock & roll band. The thing is, all three of them seem to be wholly devoted to the creation of screwed-up weirdo noise rather than rock & roll. And there's nothing wrong with that -- just because it's a bunch of screwed-up weirdo noise doesn't mean it can't be fun. There's actually a logic to most of
Arrived in Gold, at least after it opens with the dribbling chaos of "One Out of Ten." "Sugar Sediment" is almost ambient, with its guitar-as-dented-steel-drum ostinato and its marching-band drum. "Last Seed" invokes
Muslimgauze in a twisted sort of way, and the album-ending "Arrived in Gold, Arrived in Smoke" stretches out in a distended, episodic sprawl that starts out kind of interesting and ends up being not much fun at all. Okay, so maybe some of this stuff can't be fun, no matter how optimistic you are. But much of it starts making sense if you give it a chance. Maybe you don't think that's very high praise for a rock & roll album, but then you probably don't buy much from Load Records, anyway. ~ Rick Anderson