Favourite Releases of 2012: Naomi Punk - The Feeling (Captured Tracks)

Three words I would use to describe Naomi Punk's debut album The Feeling: unsettlingly crooked; agitated. Not that the album scares me, but it's just a bit off-centre; it constantly teeters, sustaining a feeling of anxiety that things could tip at any moment.

There's a primordial power to The Feeling that comes not only from its minimalism and rough recording but the way the Seattle three-piece bashes out its riffs and sing with abandon. Naomi Punk's bare, unconventional riffs are anything but smooth, and the sparseness of it all accentuates the space the already loosely recorded instruments have to ring out between each other. The result is an overall hauntedness to the cavernous album.

Naomi Punk aren't outstandingly unique - there has been a recent rise in the number of dank, sludgy bands with similar aesthetics on the West Coast - but they do what they do distinctly (and well) enough that The Feeling has been one of the cooler releases I've heard all year. And it was released by Brooklyn-based label Captured Tracks, one of my favourites. Hopefully, having signed with Captured Tracks as recently as in September, we'll hear more from Naomi Punk next year and on a more prominent level.