Ouiji rather

Two minutes of noncommittal synth? Videoed-up video of a girl lighting a candle? Yeah, relish it, resent it — do whatever, but keep listening.

What follows is as fine a four-chord rock song as I’ve heard all spring.

“Fuck Off” is track A1 from “Gothdammit,” a month-old EP by Grave Babies of Seattle. The ostentatious names all seem inevitable when you learn they’re labelmates of Hunx & His Punx.

What isn’t so inevitable is the unassuming sonority here, and I’m afraid not elsewhere on the EP.

Another critic thought of Joy Division and The Cure. I thought only of “Deceit,” the 1981 album by This Heat, in which the senate and people of Rome sing together over what might be every sound. Grave Babies’ scope is narrower, all melancholy, but the similarly hollow and harmonious enunciations are infatuating, not least because the noise and grit dissolve them.

But noise is just a ballast, and that’s video artist Jordan Utley’s oversight: He tries to rough it up. It’s rough enough — and soft anyway.

By Zech Scott