Posts Tagged ‘Noise’

Nasty Little Lonely – Rack and Ruin

Posted: 1 April 2016 in Albums
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22nd April 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

When members of Pulled Apart By Horses and God Damn are bigging up your band, you’ve got to be doing something right – if you’re on the market for something gnarly, guitar-led and tripping on the wild side, that is.

‘Rack and Ruin’ picks up where their last EP, Son of the Flies left off, with ‘Lizardbrain’, which features on the latter now appearing on the full-length. It’s everything you’d expect from a band who have a track called ‘Fuck Off Brian Eno’: don’t come looking for anything mellow or ambient or even remotely melodic here. But if you’re after a sonic kick in the nuts, that’s a different matter altogether. Welcome…

A buzzsaw guitar slews in against a low-slung, thunderous bass groove to cut an angular racket on the album’s opener, ‘Pound of Flesh’. Tense, and not without a dash of mania and a cocksure sleaze, it grinds and yelps and chops and before you know it, they’re assailing your cranium with the squalid ‘Say What You Want’. ‘Machinery’, the sole track culled from their Bad Jack & Other Stories is less of a standout and more of a rime contributor to the album’s density and the relentlessness of the assault.

The heavily rhythmic ‘No Way Back’ and ‘Snake Oil’ with its epic trudging beat slow the pace but increase the force of the attack amidst desert guitars and squalling feedback. Elsewhere, ‘The Priest’ is a collision of old-school goth and blistering noise rock. It’s not pretty. It isn’t supposed to be.

The production’s suitably murky, and there are hints of the 90s underground which seems to be re-emerging now, about ‘Rack and Ruin’. Forgotten cult acts like Headcleaner and Jacob’s Mouse collide with elements of Shellac and Gallon Drunk to create a swaggering, big-bollocked mess of noise (as is fitting for an album housed in a sleeve with more cocks and balls than you can count), and as such, they stand alongside contemporaries like Blacklisters.

It isn’t all noise as such – there are some skewed pop moments lurking beneath the sludge – but every track teeters gleefully on the brink of maniacal catastrophe. With guitars set to stun and their sensibilities attuned to the back-catalogue of labels like Sub Pop and Touch ‘n’ Go, Rack and Ruin is nasty indeed. It’s also fucking belting.

Nasty Little Lonely - Rack

 

Nasty Little Lonely on Bandcamp

The Body & Full Of Hell – One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache

Posted: 25 March 2016 in Albums
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Neurot Recordings – 25th March 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Full of Hell seem to be an act who thrive on collaboration, with their previous release, Full of Hell and Merzbow proving to be a magnificent if suitably challenging meeting of strains of noise which nothing if not effective.

Small wonder that the press release states that Neurot Recordings is very pleased to announce a full-length collaborative debut between apocalyptic doom duo, The Body, and grindcore/harsh noise sculptors, Full Of Hell.

I’ll admit that the title is something of an obstacle for me, reminding me as it does of Hole – specifically, ‘Doll Parts’ but the squalling barrage of percussion-led noise that explodes in the first minute of the title track obliterates all reminders of anything other than the need to continue breathing. From the fury emerge grand, mangled powerchords that sweep against a sombre march.

The cover version of the Leonard Cohen track ‘The Butcher’ is a real standout track, despite being barely recognisable in this dank, droning mutant form. But yes, beneath the gut-churning 10bpm sludge and barely audible, Cohen’s barren lyrics are howled and snarled.

The drums are back to the fore on ‘Gerhorwilt’, a thunderous, speaker-smashing tumult combine with tortured, and torturous, vocalisations that barely sound human, while ‘Himmer and Holle’ is a wall of noise that’s the very definition of infernal. Incredibly, the punishment ratchets up another notch or three on the desolate grind of ‘Bottled Um’, and there’s a sense of relief on arriving at the end of the album’s final track, the blackest of black ‘The Little Death’.

That this album is beyond noisy – a pretty relentless assault from beginning to end – is only half the story. The individual tracks display a polarity of pace, with crawling dirges buttressing hundred-mile-an-hour thrashout frenzies. As such, the extremities of the dynamics of tempo are accentuated, hurling the listener back and forth while continually battering the senses with violent sound.

Is it a coincidence it’s being released on Good Friday? Probably not. It does, after all, feel like the sonic equivalent of crucifixion. Hellish, heavy and even more hellish, the day you hear this album is the day you will ache in ways you never imagined possible.

Body Full of Hell

 

 

The Body & Full of Hell at Neurot Recordings

Amute – Bending Time in Waves

Posted: 1 March 2016 in Albums
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Humpty Dumpty Records – HMPTY030 – 5th February 2016

James Wells

Sometimes, there is simply no substitute for volume. Marking something of a change of direction from his previous Amute albums, Jérome Deuson has embraced something that could be considered more of a ‘rock’ aesthetic in cranking everything up to 11. But this isn’t a question of indulgence. It’s about the transformative nature of volume. It’s the volume of the sounds which determine the way the notes and tones interact on the pieces on Bending Time in Waves. The dominant instrument is guitar, bathed in reverb and pushed to the max to forge vast cathedrals of sound. You might loosely call it shoegaze, or slacker indie, or simply ‘alternative’, as we did back in the 90s. And there’s very much a 90s feel to Bending Time in Waves, an album capable of the same kind of temporal discoordination as induced by My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.

Beneath the tumults of guitar, there are some pounding drums, but like everything else, they’re partially obscured, semi-submerged amidst a tidal wave of treble, a screed of overloading sound that fizzes and crackles and fuzzes. Winsome slacker introspections played delicately and ponderously are transformed by the ear-splitting volume, crackles, and pops of cracking transistors and hisses of feedback. Soft swathes of soaring strings cascade in and out again on tsunamis of reverb-soaked guitar. Quiet moments of reflection, hushed and sincere swell outwards exponentially, threatening to obliterate Deuson’s fragile psyche.

It’s disorientating, bewildering, overwhelming. But there are some nice songs to be discovered, underneath it all.

Amute

Amute Online

Britney – Britn3y

Posted: 16 February 2016 in Albums
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Superstar Destroyer – 11th March 2016

James Wells

Not so much a drone as a collective groaning sigh prefaces the thunderous barrage of brutal rage that splits the speaker cones with pummelling drums and bursts of screaming vocal anguish and stop/start guitar judders. ‘Fully Ben’ assails the lugholes like Truman’s Water having been tortured, brutally murdered, butchered and cast forth to crawl around in purgatory. Fuck me. Three minutes in and I’m dizzy, punch-drunk, giddy and utterly bewildered – in the kind of way I like. And that pretty much sets the tone for this most manic, frenzied albums.

Where do you even begin with this white-hot torrent of noise? The tempos, man! The jolting, jarring, spasmodic guitars! What is this? It’s not metal, that’s for sure. Noisy math-rock? Math-rock is about intricacy, and this is intricate in terms of structure and changing tempos and time-signatures, but at the same time, it’s violent, frenetic. The vocals aren’t your regular shouty, screamy effort, either– this is the sound of pure mania, derangement to the power of 10. Not so much psychedelic as psychotic, the songs – the majority of which clock in at under two minutes – melt into one another, a crazed blur of spasmodic noise.

It’s intense, but not conventionally heavy: the guitars are warped, elastic, and don’t rely on hefty distortion. ‘Neon Python’ sounds like a collision of early Pulled Apart by Horses and second-album These Monsters – only with more drugs. Seriously, what are these guys on?

There are occasional breaks – ‘Sleep Now Dogman’ provides two minutes of respite in the form of some woozy percussion-free experimentalism while someone chunders their guts up, presumably a physical reaction to the exertion of the preceding track – but ultimately, this is beyond full-on, Especially after the, er, ‘interlude’.

‘Boss Moggy’ goes electro-math-screamo – or something and ‘Gum’ ups the tempo and the racket even further, achieving the effect of a sonic blizzard. You don’t know where you are or what you’re listening to, it’s a total whiteout. Britn3y isn’t an album – it’s a convulsive, abrasive explosion of noise, the aural equivalent of someone’s brains bursting from their skull while they twitch uncontrollably having been connected to an open mains electrical circuit. In short, it sounds exactly the way the cover looks.

If you’re in any doubt, I mean it’s good. Mental, but really, really good.

Britn3y

Britn3y by Britney Online

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