The latest edition of MFT's EP in a Weekend series stomps in with a wallop of a quartet: Sonny Blood (of Apache Dropout), Louie-Louie Allin (of the Constants), John Zeps (of Dirtbike, Transgression) and Joey Morrow, all of it engineered and recorded by Sharlene Birdgsong (who has, in case you missed it, also lately been pumping flames into our IN Covers series). It's four tracks of garage and basement tumble and you can listen below.

We open on "Do It." The framing's tight and narrow and the melismatic vocals smear right up and down the center. Rhythm guitar, bass, and drums structure a fuzzy bed while over in the left speaker, a lead guitar lick twinkles and pokes the whole way through. It sometimes aligns with the vocals, sometimes jabs contrapuntally, always scratches up the texture, musses the fuzz.

When the time's not there to fuss over every little detail, a lot of things end up coming down to instinct and personality. Hear that in "Do It;" hang on to the way the song climbs up drum fills into the blues-based resolutions at the ends of phrases. Every band since the beginning of time has once or twice leaned on a five chord to bring them back down, but there's something peculiar in the way these specific four guys pile up tones just to let them topple back down to the tonic. And it's this, right here, that's what these EPs are for.

Next up, "Searchin'" is more about the mire. "Do It" might've gone up just to fall right back down, but "Searchin'" sets controls straight for the molten core of our floating rock. Slowing things down and with vocals that sound like, yeah, searching screeches waiting for someone to save them, the whole song has the aspect of sinking deeper and deeper. The song moves forward haltingly, almost, until it's funneled into a wall of noise jam at the end. Like it's a deep-rooted tree getting tugged at by a chain and a truck. Eventually it'll rip right out, but saying exactly when is impossible.

"Hercules:" this one's my favorite. It's a more-or-less instrumental doo-wop waltz paired with dots and dashes of tape collage intermittently peaking through like secret codes. As it wafts something sounding an awful lot like vocodered vocals sneaks in. Am I tripping? That's the question, yes. It's an odd little respite in the middle of the comparatively straight-ahead rock on the rest of this little EP. Part of me wonders what might've come if they'd gone this way the whole time. Another part of me likes how it's cordoned off and set in starker contrast.

And then we arrive at "Swamp Rat," the most harmonically fully-realized track on here. Where the first three were to greater and lesser extents vibe pieces (no doubt in part as a result of the compressed timeline for the creation of the thing not leaving a ton of time to re-engineer Van Dyke Parks' from scratch) this one feels the most "songlike" (again with that contrast since it follows up "Hercules"). Maybe I'm biased against rats a little too much, but naming this track after those nasty creatures feels fitting. All its "songliness" is used in service of pure, pure moaning sledges of grime.

A special thanks, as always, goes out to Vibes Music and Sam Ash for sponsoring our EP in a Weekend project. And as well, a very kind thanks to Justin Shimp of BrainTwins for the artistic rendering of the participants up top.