Sightings - Amusers and Puzzlers (2015)

After the release of their well-received ninth studio album, Terribly Well, and their successful month long European tour in 2013, Sightings did the unexpected and quietly disbanded without notice or explanation.

More than 15 years in the trenches and making a mess throughout New York City, the band made more of a polarizing impact to formalized underground music that most of their peers. Sightings would have been a national treasure if the whole country was laid to waste in Armageddon.

During the sessions that birthed Terribly Well, a complimentary album was recorded in tandem which, while not intended to be their final statement, produced the jaded epilogue from the mouth of experimental rock’s most lasting monolith. Amusers and Puzzlers is the schizophrenic culmination of their brand of damaged rock. Isolated noise patterns shifted from Mark Morgan’s unorthodox guitar patterns sewn up from his nervous, scattered vocal phrasing. Richard Hoffman’s stampede-like momentum on bass slammed against Jon Lockie’s drum triggers made the past couple decades crash into itself.
Limited to 500 copies with cover art/design by Bill Nace (Body/Head).

Artist and experimental music pioneer, Tom Smith (To Live and Shave in LA) has been side-saddled with the band since its inception. He writes about “Amusers and Puzzlers”:

Sightings, visual prisoners, admonish the rebuke.
Lesser steamers venerate excess; mirrors board tranquil wheels into the unseen. A Huggy Bear douche in a LETTRISME tee is still Ivanka T, reeking of suet.
“Amusers and Puzzlers” is foreshortened, a loose spray of attenuation.

Bewildered dynamics extend to celebrity furniture. Essential graphic poets superimpose blueshifted ghost stalks. “40 photos, Arden, early ’96, destructive representation report.”

No. Sightings’ “Counterfeited” is carried first on the back of its bleating, knotted in inevitability. Their “1982″ projects a monumental collage of boos, in intervals. “Thirteen” strikes a black bell. “Trials of Peter” is a meadow of vapor, an opaque vacancy. “Syllabus of Errors” disciplines an inheritor. “I Steal from My House” recites the phrase “symphony world members, symphony chiseling flashes, symphony paint time,” in white foam, jackknifing.

Principal voices adorn the parting of faith; Sightings regress phonemes. “Amusers and Puzzlers” is soaked in juices.