Labels: Waking Records
Review by: Alex Deller
Most records you can fall right into without a single hitch or misgiving. They ease you in softly or present you with no challenges whatsoever, just a familiar set of tricks and enough aural signposts that you know exactly where things are heading. Then you get the others, those malevolent bastards that garner a strange enjoyment from testing the boundaries of your patience and ability to sit comfortably through what they’re playing. The Faeries’ Riot In The Hive Mind is just one of these perversities, a thirteen-song smorgasbord of ugly, unsettling noises wrapped in a sleeve that bubbles over with paranoid pictures and scrawls, jagged letters and strange beasts seeming to writhe across the page before your eyes can focus on them, suggesting that if the artwork is like this you should probably be battening down the hatches for whatever the music is going to sound like.
An immediate reference point would be imagining Palatka playing Pg. 99 songs, the breakneck speed, stops n’ starts and ragged, tinny sounds tumbling from each instrument all more than enough to make such a comparison logical. If that was the end of the story we’d have no problems, but there’s something else lurking beneath the flailing punk rock surface, a seamy undercurrent that suggests something has been feeding on Melvins or Butthole Surfers records by moonlight and given itself a royal bellyache in the process. The result is a far grimier, foul-mouthed racket than you might expect, snatches of grubby rock n’ roll or groaning Swans-esque dirges forcing themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with the unregimented punk rock clatter and making for a record that never goes exactly where you think it will and couldn’t care less if its caterwauling makes you want to vomit.
Uneasy listening to the max and definitely not for the meek, this should give you something to chew over and consider rather than digest witlessly and forget ten minutes after you’ve played it. That’s not to say you’re bound to like the damn thing, but at least the Faeries will have fun at your expense while you’re trying to figure it all out”¦