Denver-based band Nightshark’s relationship with melody is as distant as the possibility of being your own grandfather; it’s strained at times through moments of cohesion and at the best of times might look finest with a set of quotation marks around it. In their earliest days, when drummer Andrew Lindstrom and guitarist Mike Buckley played as a twosome, they must have sounded like a particularly tuneless duo. Vefore that, when Cockrocket was their name and Buckley’s then-roommate Bryan squealed through a trombone and a homemade bass, the music, when one uses the word objectively, was best described as Lindstrom himself puts it, “a shitload of noise.”

Now the duo is a trio, with the added phrasings of Rebeca Mhalek on saxophone who joined the group in April of 2004, right before the band made the large and reportedly successful step of opening up for Sonic Youth and Wolf Eyes. Even though the group is now three, this doesn’t explain where a lot of these sounds are coming from. The band’s first record, a collection of live recordings from December 2004 to July 2005, only begins to shine on their spastic and uncouth nature. “I recorded everything with my Yamaha cassette four track,” says Lindstrom. “Four microphones and around six live shows. I think we got as much out of those recordings as we could.” The disc, after its informal recording, went into the hands and studio of Collin Bricker at NFA studios where the disc first began its ascent into the shining light and glimmer of a professionally pressed self-released record.