Labels: thin the herd
Review by: Alex Deller
Starting with the nerve-shredding trill of broken clarinets, Total Shutdown set to wax their peculiar vision of the shape of jazz to come. After the initial skronk-fest things become slightly more sane, with certain clanging noises making their way out of the mess that could, if one is being particularly liberal with their terminology, be called songs. Short, frenzied blasts combining a great many different noises: randomly hit piano keys, trumpet screeches, cartoonish yelps, gruntings like a corpse passing wind, all strung maniacally together in one hideously compelling splurge, like watching cut and paste footage of a hundred fast-forwarded natural disasters. Just imagine Racebannon, Ornette Coleman and an early incarnation of Napalm Death in some hideous catastrophe that involves severed heads and limbs. Then picture some dastardly lunatic haphazardly sewing the pieces back together, before defying nature and forcing life back into their mangled bodies. That ugly image might be somewhere close to where this is coming from. A headache waiting to happen, basically.