Drummer Jochen Rueckert uses his Wolff Parkinson White alias when he is in the mood for subverting the romantic notion of the soulful vocalist tugging the heartstrings of the listener. This he does by surrounding the singer in question with a barrage of sonic accompaniment that tests the strength of the singer’s ability to put across an emotion.
Hayden’s voice is a gentle, sensual thing that sometimes whispers and sometimes croons, but is never taxing. That is left to the rubbery, odd textured, glitchy jostle that accompanies all the vocals here, and the disjointed, seemingly random skips and hops on opener “If Only” even manage to cause Hayden to follow a similarly stuttering, crazy paving path. Interconnected synth lines behave like shifting sand, but Hayden happily navigates it all as if in a trance, or as if he were stepping slightly above the ground and was heedless of the surrounding uproar. There is no dishevelment in the delivery, the glitchiness never becomes an irritant and they combine surprisingly well.
There is an absolute wealth of sound sources here, with touches of hobbled techno and cut-up digital voices repeated and stretched to a point where they are only recognisable as they slow down. On “For The Queen”, Hayden’s voice is like a caramel breath in a half-awake ear spread across the slow beatless tones that rest in a foggy smear. It is eventually besmirched by changes that destroy what came before, totally effacing it with the voice resisting all the way. “Back Home To A Soft Place” is almost danceable, but veers into drunkeness with cod-horror Gameboy effects. There is ghostly laughter, radio chatter and devil talk on “Repeated Failure”, with electronic fireflies passing and pursuing, resting and fretful. The illimitable patterns at play are mind-boggling, and sometimes the pieces play on three levels: the vocals drifting and weightless; an almost casual pattern of rhythm; and then a scree of electronic chatter that scars the landscape and scrapes and stretches, dissected and disassembled as molten sound.At times you catch a moment of of serenity, where the backdrop drones and tones act as a hypnotic lure with the scattershot coating removed briefly; but this is never allowed to outstay its welcome before being subsumed like an electronic Pompeii. This is quite an event, Hayden giving everything to welcome the listener as Jochen piles on the pressure, dragging us into the shadows.
I can’t picture for the life of me how the pieces on Off World are constructed, but I am certainly pleased that somebody out there is doing it. It is quite a feat and one that requires careful consideration before embarking.-Mr Olivetti-
