Labels: Level Plane
Review by: Kunal Nandi
There is nothing weak about this astonishing record. Imagine an utterly unholy meeting place where painfully extreme noise crudely molests wilfully bloody-minded, ragged rock “n’ roll for some noisemongery on an epic scale, and you’re only halfway there. It’s a psychotically primitive endurance test on a purely surface level, but delve deeper to find a deceptively layered and intelligent piece of work. There must be a beat there for a start. I can feel my foot tapping. Stamping even. The Unsane-y guitar / bass setup and Arab On Radar-y vocals wail away, but there’s something else there. Distortion… being used as an instrument. A boiling, turbulent layer of sonic scree slathers the whole thing, but it’s not used to simple random bludgeoning effect. Rather, it naturally takes a life of its own, numbing the mind with its anaesthetising monotony, creating an experience that is simultaneously the worst of your life, yet also a cathartic one, probably more for the players by the “sound” of it. Songs kick off in a hail of feedback, crash through a few repeated motifs for a significant portion of an hour, and then mutually come to a car-crash of an ending before someone decides to pull the plug. Hideous. Beautiful.