Review by: Alex Hannan
So here we have the guitarist and drummer of DIET PILLS with a new power trio. “Under” starts out very much like a home-grown KARP, snotty vocals over subtly tweaked-out stoner-influenced riffing that needles with repetition while shifting rhythmic patterns underfoot. So far, fairly close to DIET PILLS’ bread and butter. DISABILITY transition away from this with a slowdown at the one minute mark and a brief a cappella singsong before abruptly switchbacking the listener through alternations of cleaner, spacious, bass-driven textures (“Every good boy deserves a clock,” sneers the vocalist) and, unexpectedly, jangly post-rock. The opening riffs are recycled to round out the song.
An uneasy, yowling vocal performance drags “Amnesia” gradually from cleanish string-bent melody into smeary sludginess. It becomes clearer that the fuzzbomb onslaught of DIET PILLS has been dialled back at points for a more nuanced, multi-textured sound – actually hinted at on the last demos of the earlier band – and whereas the DIET PILLS LP was heavy on the doom transcendence / amplifier worship, there’s more of a scattershot irritainment tendency going on here. A melodic chorus lights up the second half of “Amnesia”, all the more effective for its singularity.
“Tooth” and “Ode” feature some of the crunchiest riffing of the tape, mixed into a characteristic patchwork construction of textures and sections. “Tooth” returns to a quietly ominous cyclical refrain between guitar outbursts and “Ode” settles into longer sections of lumbering rhythm section work. The main riff of “Ode” crosses the line from rhythmically quirky into cluttered, and the song as a whole doesn’t cohere for me – it feels like a succession of ideas strung together that touch on interesting textures but lack overall direction.
The lyrics are self-consciously detached, a collage of cliches and banalities: “Anyway who cares transport is overrated / When buried underneath x, y is limited / Could become an employee, a means to an end / Every good boy deserves a clock / Don’t be the worst one” (from “Under”.) “Tooth” is an insular reflection on ritual tics: “Every day when I’m alone, constantly rhythms playing over and over in my head / The teeth on the left side of the mouth at as the bass drum and the right do the snare / It keeps me amused when things are boring.” They remind me at points of the more obsessional of Doc Dart’s CRUCIFUCKS lyrics, but I find myself wishing DISABILITY had a bit more of the satirical bite of the American band.