Labels: Crucial Blast
Review by: Nick Sharp
Hi.
Geisha are from Bristol and this is their second full-length. They’ve been knocking about since, ooh, the early 00s and they’ve – via a slow seeping of releases – built themselves a steady, FX-heavy vibe redolent of bad sex, worse drugs, and all kinds of soft-focus arterial mulch
The eight-minute opening number makes like a thumb in the glans, opening on a swaying, Isn’t Anything-styled tremolo’d chord wangle that is married to a ‘YYZ’ anti-jig. Next, it shits everywhere and grinds down into a hideous smear of bullet-mic, cymbal and static-belch before dusting itself off to generate some uptempo abandon with chord-sequences that are lovingly laid-out, before falling apart several times more ’til close. Splendid.
Much of the time, those of the noise-rock canon who freewheel their way through lengthy, structure-fucked songs lack the sonic smarts and/or the overall intelligence to not sound dilettantish. Geisha sidestep this elegantly. Give or take a few infrequent passages of mood-breaking and sore-thumbish clean guitar/delay + reverb post-rockery (moments which undermine Die Verbrechten’s otherwise uniform unfriendliness), the first five of the six overall tracks successfully wed Unsane in-the-red haemorraging, a knack for sonic modification, and a satisfyingly hackneyed punk-ugly aesthetic.
That’s the first half of Die Verbrechen’s running time taken care of. The remainder is a half-hour long mong-fest called ‘Theme for Diana’. Where it should be tantamount to doing a sizeable bong from an asbestos pipe, it ends up being less satisfying that that what comes before: looped vocal samples, treated cymbals, spacious guitars doing ascending chord-patterns. Nicely played, well-designed, but lacking the tension/release flexing that is present in the slightly more digestable earlier numbers. It does, however, have a satisfyingly nasty cymbal/theremin/guitar clusterfuck to round it off.
My minor disappointment in the final number is no doubt intensified by how very good the previous entries are. That music of this ilk is trotted out by a million-and-one dullards makes it all the more commendable that Geisha maintain the essential ability to be genuinely oblique, distinct and unabashedly intelligent. Neat.