Overdrive/SKiN GRAFT – 15th November 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
When it comes to writing about bands who clearly function as a collective unit, it usually feels wrong to focus on any one member. But Eugene S Robinson is someone who stands out, not only in his singularity as a member of any band he plays with but within the alternative scene more broadly. The fact of the matter is that there aren’t many suit-wearing, bespectacled black men in noise rock, and this is a man who has blazed trails and then some. Famously founding Oxbow in 1988 as a means of recording his ‘suicide note’ before departing the band this year due to “the weight of irreconcilable differences, none of them aesthetic or musical.” It’s perhaps an understatement to remark that this is a man who has carved a unique path in music, and Mansuetude marks something of a shift for Buñuel following the trilogy of albums comprising A Resting Place for Strangers, The Easy Way Out and Killers Like Us.
Mansuetude is a whole lot more direct, less experimental, than any of its predecessors.
The album comes in hard: ‘Who Missed Me’ crashes in with an ear-shredding squall of feedback and distortion – that bass! And you’re swimming in noise before the crunching riff slams in… and then there’s the beat and… fuck. It’s too much! It’s brutal, launching between frenetic hardcore and pure mania. By the end, it feels like three songs playing at once and I’ve got heartburn before it collapses into a simmering afterburn. And then the blistering mathy blast of single cut ‘Drug Burn’ roars in with the deranged, lurching intensity of the Jesus Lizard at their fiercest.
There is absolutely no let-up: ‘Class’ is led by a big, dirty bass and hits with a density which hit around the solar plexus.
Just two songs in, you feel punch-drunk, breathless, weak at the knees. And they’re only just getting warmed up.
‘Movement No. 201 broods and skulks in a sea of reverb, and offers brief respite and alludes the kind of spoken word /experimental pieces on previous albums, but the explosions of noise hurt. ‘Bleat’ gets bassier, dirtier, heavier, more suffocating., the warped and twisted layering of the vocals intensifying the experience, the sensation of everything closing in.
It’s the relentlessly thunderous percussion that dominates ‘A Killing on the Beach’, but then the guitars roar in like jet engines and holy shit. Again, the multi-layered vocals raining in from all sides sting like the tasers referred to in the lyrics and everything is fizzling and sizzling in the most intense way. And then they crash in with ‘Leather bar’: it’s s seven-and-a-half-minute monster, a droning colossus and a true megalith of a track. As much as it recalls Sunn O))), I’m reminded of a personal favourite, ‘Guitars of the Oceanic Undergrowth’ by Honolulu Mountain Daffodils. It culminates in a thick wall of distorted guitars, the kind you can simply bask in. It borders on the brutality of Swans circa ’86. It’s harsh, it’s heavy it’s punishing.
The high-paced alt-rock, hardcore-flavoured frenzy that is ‘High. Speed. Chase’ is heavy and puns at a hundred miles an hour, and ‘Fixer’ is a tempest of raw energy, bleeding into the sub-two-minute gut-churner that is he blistering hardcore grind of ‘Trash’. ‘Pimp’ collides punishing repletion with skull-crushing weight, while the last track, the six-minute ‘A Room in Berlin’ finally brings an experimental edge and a spoken-word element to the soundtrack to a nuclear winter, with the most harrowing effect.
Everything about Mansuetude is dense, dark, and raging. It’s relentless in its ferocity, its raging intensity, an album that never lets up and is truly punishing at any pace. It’s an outstanding album, but it hurts.
AA
Aural Aggravation 