Wasn’t really expecting this. Off the back of their ‘Freakspeed’ cassette I had Pohl down as a frazzled-sounding grunge thing with some noise-rock clumping crankily about in the basement. Here, though, they deliver a huge, walloping dose of ROCK that, while admittedly still pretty weird, feels like a different entity entirely. Things’re built around a series of delicious hammer-to-the-head riffs that remind me a lot of Torche, both in terms of heft and velvet-draped melody. It’s at the edges, though, that things begin to get even more interesting. A psychedelic sense of blur and crackle intrudes; samples bleeding into vocal lines and wordless chants becoming one with the fragmenting forward thrust. Everything feels huge and epic, but you’ll be mystified to learn that most songs hover round the three-minute mark – everything readily digestible, yet full of flavours and textures you don’t fully understand. It’s blissful, a blast, and occasionally a source of vague worry: a strangely accessible headfuck, and one of the records I’ve spent the most time with over the last couple of months.
