Based in Champaign, IL, Rectangle’s colorful brand of noisy indie pop is often peculiar and dissonant, but is always melodic, inventive and engaging. As a new signing to the innovative noise-pop label Sterorrific, they join a roster of playful, experimental indie artists including Miss Mary, The Weisstronauts and Garret Caples.

Rectangles’ debut Bunker features eerie, pretty guitar work, rule-breaking, mumbling Velvet Underground-esque melodies, vivacious, melodic basslines creatively blended with cello, toy piano and the occasional optigan.

The arrangements are loose and spontaneous, often withering into quiet, flickering guitar shrills then building into wobbly, loose melodic structures and occasionally bursting into brash, raucous outbursts of Stooges-like thrash pop.

The melodies slip in and out of tonality and the band remains consistent and sensitive to whatever bizarre structure they’ve commenced, delivering attention-gripping kaleidoscopes of imaginative guitar work all within some blurry concept of pop music. Being obviously rooted in the works of Pavement, The Velvet Underground and The Pixies, Rectangle is building on a fertile tradition of indie rock with an originality and musicianship that makes for some of the finest noise pop of the current independent universe.

And while the band’s claim that Bunker is the first important statement of the 21st century might be a bit of a stretch, it is no doubt one of the first important records of 2001.
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Jagged yet elegant, Rectangle's creepy, mangled songs would make Ash Bowie proud. Swooping, tangling guitars navigate accurate, loosely structured arrangements, occasionally chiming in together for abstractly melodic choruses. Refreshingly, there's not a Top-40 hook or traditionally metered rhythm to be found here. Lyrics are dry but warmly layered, emphasizing their sound as much as their meaning. Ash Bowie purists should love Rectangle -- especially those who love Polvo's angular and disjointed Today's Active Lifestyles. Few recognize the difficulty and ingenuity in tuning guitars this strangely and singing this atonally, but for those who do, Rectangle are their diamond in the rough.
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What is it about these previously undistinguished little towns that causes them to suddenly become indie rock meccas? Perhaps the presence of a big university nearby. That's what did it for Austin, Chapel Hill, and maybe the newest college rock entry, Champaign-Urbana, home of Braid, Menthol, and the Poster Children, among others. That Midwestern region has most recently produced the dissonant rock outfit Rectangle. The four-cornered foursome displays a love for guitars and all the strange, magical things they can do in their twisted but catchy indie rock songs. Listen for alternate tunings, effects pedals, and weird, almost Middle Eastern chord progressions as Rectangle's dual tensile guitar lines twine around one another like gossamer threads woven by hyperactive spiders. Yes, Poster Children indie rock magic carpet rides can be counted an influence on the Illinois quartet's sound, as can a number of the usual indie rock suspects -- Sonic Youth, Pavement, and The Pixies -- but Rectangle has a creepy, mangled, sometimes startling mien all its own. The band debuted in 1998 with an EP, Prowl Across the Arctic, then came back in 2000 with their first album, Bunker (produced by the Poster Children's Rick Valentin), where you can find the featured "Kilowatt Per Hour Counter" and "John Canoe."
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