Labels: Crucial Blast
Review by: Alex Deller
Long are the hours I’ve spent with this Dimesland release. It’s the kind of album that you either turn off in fear and disgust after thirty seconds or spend long afternoons being drawn into, as though you’re being pulled through a wormhole and having your atoms scattered across the furthest reaches of the cosmos. I have found myself in both of these situations, though more frequently the latter than the former. I meant to review it when it was released digitally, and I failed. Then Crucial Blast released it physically, and I am far beyond tardy. I’d like to claim it was because I had to spend so much time regathering my scattered atoms, but in realty it’s just a bit of a difficult one. Complex, wayward, challenging cyber-thrash is what they seem to be playing. The jagged, pixellated shadow of Voivod looms large, which by extension assures the likes of Coroner and Watchtower are also points of reference. But Dimesland aren’t straight-up thrash in the same way a band like, say, Vektor are. No. The lumbering turns and frequent thumb-to-eyesocket jabs also recall acts like Starkweather, Keelhaul and Thoughts Of Ionesco … bands who owe their own strange debts to Voivod, albeit in a warped way. And then there are the vocals. These arrive as shrieks, but are used infrequently and inconsistently. This is worrying, and ensures you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, as though you’re lost in a bad part of town and carrying some rare and valuable cargo. Whenever you think you have familiarised yourself with any of it, it seems to have changed and created itself anew. It is perfect and futuristic and somehow represents the many gnashing faces of all humanity’s modern-day turmoil. Indeed, you get the sense that if we sent this up into space (perhaps accompanied by a bitter, snarling, computer-generated facsimile of Harlan Ellison) then it might not just represent a more realistic example of current human endeavour and existence than Bach or Stravinsky, but perhaps even act as a safety measure to ward off anything ominous while we shout out into that big, dark jungle that none of us fully understand.