Labels: Ektro
Review by: Alex Deller
I don’t know much about this band bar an Ut connection and that they’ve been chucking out sporadic releases since the mid-90s, but this is really pretty excellent. Things kick off with ‘On Game’, which presents my preferred side of things: fuggy post-punk with muffled vocals that sound like a late 80s Kim Gordon skit looped, elongated and dragged towards a blissful krautrock oblivion. ‘Oui Window’ follows, which is slightly harder to digest, offering a troubled bout of scrapes, jazzy clatters and mumbled atonality. Back, then, the pendulum swings to ‘Helium’ which has a great cranky pulse to it, the rusty metal scrape of the guitar repetitions sounding like a snippet of early Fall or Au Pairs grubbied up and fixed in a wonderful five-minute lockgroove. After this things get a little more abstract, the vocals ever more scattered and disconnected, flitting amid computerised drum patterns, stabs of agitated guitar noise and moments of blustery drone that’s all a bit reminiscent of what Blonde Redhead might’ve sounded like if they kicked their poppiness into touch and fully embraced the clanky weirdness of their first few records. Lovely stuff.