(Delusions of Adequacy) There's a commonly held belief in Major League Baseball that a person cannot tell how good or bad a team is unless they witness them play on a regular basis. The subtle nuances, level of physical and mental errors, and amount of illegal growth hormones the team has ingested can't be easily discernable to even the most sophisticated baseball fan who only gets the chance to watch the team in person a few times a year. At a certain extent, the same can be said of musicians. To outsiders, the MC5, Husker Du, or Nirvana may be three of the greatest rock bands of all time, but some folks from Detroit, Minneapolis, or Seattle – who were there in the trenches – will gladly tell you that there were 10 or 15 bands from that same town and era that were as good as or better than the three aforementioned artists. Unfortunately, Denton, TX isn't really known for much more musically than as the place where Roy Orbison, Don Henley, and Tex Watson went to school, as well as the hometown of Brave Combo (polka band who covered the Doors and won a Grammy) and Brutal Juice (they played really loud and were on a major label in the mid 90s), so it would be kind of silly that to proclaim that there were 10 or 15 bands floating around Denton that were better than The Eagles or the Charles Manson Experience way back when. However, Shiny Around the Edges (as well as yours truly) live in Denton, and local music scenes these days are truly what is keeping the flames of independent rock from burning out (or fading away), so here we are. Shiny Around the Edges is a husband/wife duo (they’ve recently added a third member) that plays discordant, surround-sound, haunting, atmospheric rock similar to Things We Lost in the Fire-era Low and the Swans. The band carries with it a little bit of arty pretentiousness, but not an overbearing amount. The finest moments on Secrets of the Double Blind include the quivering monotone vocals of Jennifer Seman (especially on “Autumn Sleep”), the welcome addition of ambient blips and bleeps (“Just Below”), and those loud, atonal guitars that sound and feel like an itchy radiator turned up full blast (“Reading Scripts,” “Waiting for the Night”). Live, these songs, along with hypnotic covers of Neil Young and Velvet Underground classics, transcend into something louder, greater, and more powerful than simple art-house cacophony. Don’t look for Shiny to lead the next independent revolution or ascend to rock Valhalla status. However, the band produces solid recordings and stellar performances. And since the best and most interesting artists these days are not pseudo-indie bands located on college radio or in music zines, but rather local bands found via the Internet, Shiny Around the Edges is a nice discovery… and as far as I know, they don’t take steroids.

(Tiny Mix Tapes) Talk about being off the radar! Shiny Around the Edges may be hiding in an underground bomb shelter in Denton, Texas, but we wouldn't know because their music sounds much more like an igloo than the South. Their unsettling lullabies and questioning of existence echo in a cavernous world that they sound completely isolated in. Their music seems too personal to ever be committed to tape, yet they made Secrets of the Double Blind. Like walking in uninvited to a home of the occult, the music was unpredictable and always on the verge of explosion. Jennifer's voice (they're too reclusive for last names in their album credits), as soft and delicate as it is capable of cutting through glass, found a happy, yet unsettling, medium between Karen Carpenter and Marianne Faithful. Whether it was murky ambience or an assault of percussion and feedback, Shiny Around the Edges explored a dark void of nothingness in a surprisingly spiritual way. Remember when I said they were a little too personal? That feeling rings loud and clear when you find your CD, tied in delicate ribbon with a silk rose inside.

(Uncommon Folk) It’s interesting how some bands describe themselves and how others perceive them. It is the never-ending debate of who sounds like whom, who sounds like what, and what sounds like what. In the end, it all doesn’t matter one lick yet is an unfortunate reality art faces in today’s world. Bands have to be compared, contrasted, put into boxes and dissected in order for the majority of people to have some sort of reference point of what they may be buying is all about. Shiny Around the Edges will bring this up for a lot of listeners. The band has a very interesting way of describing themselves, writing, “Residing in Denton, Texas, Shiny Around the Edges is an atmospheric band that enjoys libraries, wide-open prairie spaces, NPR, Sonic Youth bootlegs, and Billie Holiday records. The band strives to create songs that serve as tone poems amongst the high grasses and wildflowers that make the North Texas prairie a pastoral wonderland.” At first listen Secrets of the Double Blind (a limited edition, individually handmade and self-released CD-R) may remind many listeners of the mighty Low. Slow, dark with female and male vocals playing off of each other, simple percussion and crescendos that end abruptly all lend credence to such a comparison. Even the band’s genetic make-up of two guys and a girl fits the profile (though the girl doesn’t play drums). Anyway, the band of Jennifer (guitars, vocals), Michael (guitar, vocals) and Josh (percussion) do create exactly what they set out to accomplish. Their subtlety and simplicity will remind listeners of prairies, but their often chaotic and more experimental guitar sounds veer from the pastoral to the aggressive, suggesting a love/hate relationship with their own environment. While influences of Low and Sonic Youth do abound, Shiny Around the Edges are quite original. At one moment the lush vocals of Jennifer are sweet as a summer prairie, but in an instant a rumbling storm can open the skies with layers of distorted guitars and heavy floor tom thumping scaring away the birds. It’s quite an interesting dichotomy that a lot of bands could never pull off, but this one does. Secrets of the Double Blind is an album full of dichotomies of sound, influence, and genre. "Jesus is Coming" is a Spacemen 3-esque song with ambiguous religious meaning. "Just Below" is a Low influenced slowcore ditty. "The Ghost of Ted Lavender" is a pure noise experiment. And, "In the Heart" is a folk song complete with found sounds, field recordings, gorgeous guitar picking and wondrous cymbal work. Secrets of the Double Blind even sees Shiny Around the Edges do an amazing cover of Depeche Mode’s "Waiting for the Night" (which says a lot because Uncommon Folk is a huge fan of Depeche Mode and not a fan of cover songs), making one wonder again about the spirituality guiding the band’s output. So, while at first one might seem to have Shiny Around the Edges pegged, they toss you loop after loop until you come to your senses and realize that comparison is futile and that the band has an incredible range which in the end all combines into a coherent yet ever-challenging whole, making them one of the more interesting bands around while forcing the lover of music to question the meaning of sound, art, life and why we are so quick to pre-judge and pre-package our existence and everything we do within it. The answer may lie in the dichotomous sounds of Shiny Around the Edges’ music: that we don’t know much about our own existence and our need to put ourselves at ease and live the safe life of ignorance often clouds our need to explore, learn and create without constraint. Luckily their are still plenty of explorers out there—like Jennifer, Michael and Josh.