Local Review: TECOVA — Comfortable

TECOVA
Comfortable
Streetlight Gremlins
Street: 02.06.2026
TECOVA = Knocked Loose + Descendents + Slowdive

We used to be a civilized species. It used to be that we shunned the alt-folks. It used to be that you’d get banned from using the car stereo out of fear of listening to a wall of sound for 20 minutes. It used to be that you’d stop getting invited to parties because you had a speed metal swirl on your battle jacket, and people kept mistaking you for a Neo-Nazi. It used to be that your girlfriend’s parents would forbid you from marrying her because you were Catholic. So on, so forth.

It seems nowadays, though, if you aren’t into alt music in the Salt Lake music scene, *you’re* the outsider. My last girlfriend’s favorite band was my bloody valentine. The grocery store played Bathory last time I was there. Just last week I met a seven-year-old who knew the lyrics to “Streetcleaner” by Godflesh from memory. He gave me a stick-and-poke anarchy symbol tattoo, too. They don’t teach you that on Cocomelon.

It isn’t right, and it’s certainly not Christian, but I’m all for it personally. Not for the fashion (you’d understand if you ever saw how I dress), but because so many great new albums are coming out of the mainstream alt scene. Great albums such as TECOVA’s record Comfortable come to mind. They put this record out last month, and I’ve sat with it for much of the last week. My opinion: The record is so replayable it might annoy you, assuming you can stand the mix.

The band opted to open with a punch to the face with their track “Ground Beef,” a high-velocity hardcore punk track interlaced with breakdown sections. The track sounds like a crowd pleaser when played live, with its high-strain vocals and chants. They follow with the adrenaline-induced track “At Least Once.” It opens like a Big Black track, and if they had used a TR-606 for their drums and destroyed any hint of bass in their guitar channels, it would sound nearly identical.

After the breakdown onslaught of the first four tracks, you get a very sudden change of pace with my favorite track on the record, “Just Like You.” The track is sappy and emotional in the right kind of way. It sounds like a less sobered and more vulnerable Deftones track. That guitar riff is gorgeous.

HiFi enthusiasts will certainly not be pleased by the mixing of this record, unfortunately. That snare sound must be one of the worst I’ve ever heard. It sounds like, for some awful reason, they decided to mic *just* the bottom of the snare. People hate the snare sound of St. Anger by Metallica, but at least that snare had character and a lot of great engineering behind it to make it work. There’s a fine line between creative and outright poor engineering, and I think these drum mixes cross that line.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t character in the mixes here. There are some very interesting vocal mixes, which come off as staggering at some points and quite profound in others. The bass guitar churns through most of the record in a way that fans of early Swans will love. The guitars are very fat at times, reaching that sort of tone that soaks the listener at higher volumes. I find the mixes don’t fit together particularly well until you crank the volume, though that is an issue I find with many self-mixed records (including my own).

If TECOVA ends up reading this review, here’s my advice: Take these great songs, find a reputable recording engineer and set up shop in an actual recording studio; find one of those studios with 20-foot-high ceilings and proper sound treatment to boot. Then spend about two hours recording this record live, like Rage Against the Machine’s first record, occasionally overdubbing your fancier effects. Have the same engineer mix the record for you, and you’ll get a substantially better-sounding record for the cost of a beater Civic. You guys have great songs here, so don’t sell yourself short by having bad mixes.

For all the other SLUG readers out there, listen to this record and support these guys. I think they have something really cool here. TECOVA’s new record Comfortable is available on all streaming platforms. –Ezra Smith

Read more album reviews from Contributing Writer Ezra Smith:
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