Labels: Riot Season
Review by: Alex Hannan
Reading the press sheet for this one is very much like having a coked up record label dude screaming in my ear when I’m trying to listen to the band. The classic template – band X are so totally mindblowing, they sound like animal Y blasted off their tits on drug Z – is still doing the rounds, but whereas the odd gorilla on crack used to suffice, now we have “minotaurs dipped in Immac”, amoeba men, ayahuasca and crystal meth. Sprinkle with compound genres that could mean anything (“inverse psychedelia”, “anti-funk”) and fire out of your arse at anyone who will listen.
Luckily the LP kicks off in rambunctious fashion to dispel irritation, “Black Percy” delivering speedy chunkachunka blues/boogie riffs with screaming-into-a-muzzle vocals. It’s a bracing opener. Contrast arrives straight away with the lonely off-kilter leads that snake through the early part of “Grotto crank”, an exercise in delayed gratification and delay pedal fuckery which winds up tension, coming slowly together into something resembling a coherent rhythm around the 2min mark, transitioning into bursts of uptempo riffing seasoned with effects. It’s the most interesting songwriting on the record. “World War Two Hitler Youth Dagger” moves from slow and heavy by way of some nasty little bass interludes to a middle section full of effective wrong-footing hesitations and an obsessively repeated two-note outro. At which point my verdict is that the songwriting has been interesting and varied, but I’m starting to become conscious of a lack of really memorable riffs.
“Felt leg” throws in an ambient intro eventually joined by mushmouthed keening. The full band enter after a minute and a half and spend the rest of the song banging away at one chord with the occasional end of phrase break. It’s mildly tedious, whatever the press sheet says about “a horrific orchestral wall of sonic horror.” Next up, the mid-paced reverb-fest and deep bass tones of “Midnight feast” recall KYLESA, before again shifting into a one chord headbang with some guitar lead work scrawled on it. This is where you flip the LP over, and here for me the album falls off a cliff. At a point when they’ve essentially showed their hand in terms of tricks and ideas, the second side is loaded with slow and repetitive songs, so there’s little to retain interest in what starts to look like a deathly boring trudge to the run out groove.
The riffing on “Aids Atlas” is pedestrian: a strange choice for track 1, side 2. “Shit Village” uses two main ideas over its five-and-a-half-minute running time, and the lumbering 7/4-time one particularly outstays its welcome. Repetition as an obnoxiously gruelling edge is a familiar tactic, but works best with something else to counterpoint it, like strong personality on the mic, or interesting musical material. The slurred, effects laden vocals and the flippant would-be memes of the song titles hint at a smart-arsed detachment which isn’t all that engaging.
At this point I recommend the listener take a break before continuing. Here another “Black Percy”-style uptempo song would be welcome for variation, but instead the last 3 songs continue the slow-to-mid trudging mood and are quite a struggle to get through when sequenced after “Shit Village”. Listened to away from the rest of the album, there are things to enjoy, like the stoner melodrama of “It’s what they call the clubhouse, arsehole”, or the guitar scribblings around the edges of “Pine pot”, but considered as a whole side 2 is a considerable drag to listen to. Maybe I should try it again with a dose of ayahuasca?