Labels: Insolito
Review by: Alex Deller
Understand this: I have a lot of records that scream. I love bands that scream. Blame it on Angel Hair. But sometimes it seems that even this simple pleasure is slipping away from me. Dark days when I say this. Maybe the penny dropped when reviewing countless 7″s and cds for a fanzine that may or may not ever get off the ground, and I found myself comparing this or that new band to Reversal of Man or Usurp Synapse or the Locust however many fucking times. And I realised that I bought record after record that sounds exactly the same. And that, ultimately, I’d still rather listen to the records I bought years ago than the ones that are aping them today. Because you’ll never be Honeywell and you don’t have In/humanity’s spiteful sarcasm and you just can’t crush my skull like Acme did and do.
Which is why its nice to hear something like this once in a while. Because Index For Potential Suicide rock. And they scream. And they don’t sound like something shat off of an assembly line marked “second rate Orchid knock-offs”. They’re pretty darn good. They’re fucked up and noisy. And yes, they do have elements of the Locust to them, and Usurp Synapse (with whom they shared a split). But there’s also squalls of feedback and slow sludgy parts and droning noise during the inbetweens. So we have elements of Discordance Axis and Neurosis to temper the straightahead Neil Perry pummel. And the lyrics are pretty good, points made rather than lovelorn rambles or tales of robots malfunctioning. Variations on a theme, as they say. Maybe it just sounds fresher because this shit was written four years ago or so, when there was still a smattering of the fact that this whole noise was relatively new, rather than nowadays when the styles and sounds have all been set in stone. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just talking bullshit again. But I like this record a lot.