The advance copy of any album typically lacks artwork, one-sheet, and band bio. These days it's sometimes intangible, arriving digitally in MP3, without even the band name in sharpie on CD-R to stare at. In this pre-release form, music arrives without a projected image or conceived branding. I listen unencumbered by any preconceived notions. It's dangerous for all involved. But listening is always the same. Listening is the lifting of the proscenium curtain.

You can still tell that Ruben Nesse and Simon Oakland came from hardcore band Jeroan Drive. The song still maintains the best parts of that bombastic furor. Jeroan Drive had a taste for the same rolling thunder assault of shouted vocals and unrelenting double bass. Those former washes of guitar feedback have given way to an array of shoe-gazing moods. With Simon Says No!, all the chaotic angst has been stripped away to engage in a more subtle project.

The album brilliantly segues from the hammer-drop into washes of heavy psyche and psychedelia descending into a drone-y homage to My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. Somewhere in the transfiguration are both grungy power chords ala Radiohead's "Creep" and Britpop weirdness reminiscent of Snowpony.

When shoegaze first started creeping out of the shade in the early '90s it took some harsh criticism. I'll grant that in the presence of sloppy, muddy acts like the Boo Radleys, some of the heat was deserved. But now almost 20 years later, the scene that celebrates itself has matured. So now they have come to us from Norway, a land awash in black metal and death metal. They steer the record away from the indulgent pop of Lush and instead integrate that Ride-type of aural haze and wrap it like a protective hide around the brutish hardcore rhythm machine that drives each song.

The EP does not bruise easily. It easily withstands the Jose Fritz scrutiny that sends many a release into the industrial-strength paper shredder, to die a splintering and chrome-flake death. From it's opening as a galloping Stormtroopers of Death assault, it descends upon us like a regiment of Budweiser Clydesdales. Instead of building up to some intense climactic moment, the band just explodes at the get-go and spends the next 18 minutes describing in slow-core detail what they just hit you with. Was it an open hand or a closed band? Was it a hammer? Could it be a brick? Simon Says No, it wasAhoi de Angst.