“This Minneapolis four don’t give critics much to do. They honestly list as influences Joy Division, shoegazers like Ride, Sonic Youth, Big Black, The Fall, ect. Writers get used to dubious, off-base assertions; but this EP is those bands in a blender to a “t”! Considering how far afield the aforementioned five are, it makes Artifact Shore so peculiar. The icy-silence wave of Factory records hits the shore of heavily reverbed dreampop plus avant garde noise-art and ends up spewing up a grinding industrial post-punk spray! Now, no track is the same, so permutations seem to shift from track to track in equal measure: like the eerie Sonic Youth of “Insight & Action” giving way to the drum machine claustrophobia of Ian Curtis and A Certain Ratio, with Big Black’s Dave Riley-like fuzztone basslines on “Stupid Coma”. Endlessly unusual, endlessly surprising.”
- Jack Rabid