Aural Aggravation

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 by Britney Online