Labels: self released
Review by: Alex Deller
It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while some wonderful weirdo stumbles across this site and decides to send us some strange, worrying music. It’s happened before with bands like Multicult, Quttinirpaaq and Nearly Dead, and the latest band to make me wonder what the fuck were they googling to find us is whoever put this outrageous gloop in the mail. Warp & Weft begin with what sounds like mean, drunk, stupid powerviolence stumbling into the path of US Maple: riffs loom and teeter, other riffs slip like water through shaky hands and one half of the vocal contribution sounds curiously – perhaps even medically … slowed down. The results are haphazard, ugly and deeply threatening, but they also work very well indeed … oddball culinary samples and all.
Saginaw are marginally easier to swallow, with a more clear-cut sound and less of the sense that they might randomly punch a corkscrew through the side of your face. The riffing is springy and spidery but also neatly reined in, while the vocals are a harsh, bitter scrape. There’s something of pre-Revelation Records Drowningman about them, dosed with a dash of early 00s post-screamo (Light The Fuse And Run; Transistor Transistor etc.) if those bands were less fizzy with friendship and possibility and more crushed by the slow, sour, utterly mundane rigours of modern life. These two tracks don’t do much to make you feel any better, but after the woozy menace of Warp & Weft they’re at least a devil you know … not a salve, per se, but something that seems a dab friendlier because it burns your throat and your eyes slightly less.