The fold-out sleeve holding this baby together is a delight for the eyes. Its over-printed black imagery singing from beneath a golden glow of textured stock inkling at the album’s corroded essence. The struggling definition of the half-buried vocals, that healthy scouring of frustration eating into the machined percussives. Tastes forged in Dead Gum’s “lost decade” and a myriad of other releases, a mood finely-focused and now purring your ears in song-like chunks, the type Sonic Youth used to make back in the ’80-’90s, gnarly pearls that held you in their imagination, tore into your complacency and telescoped your soul.
A brief experimental verve, climbing from its knees and then straight into the razored drums of “Afraid of heights”, at its core a wobbling undercurrent that seems to be tracing uncertain feet along the edge of a multi-storey, those snared percussives constantly prodding and poking with guitars (all noisy and barbed) swerving around hungry for catastrophe. A carmine red bite of delicious geometries vertigo(ing) the pelvic slide of words. A vibe that’s economical, evocative and spot-on, to which the following “Regain” ties to a spiralling melody banked by suitably strung-out beats. Something deliciously Ian Curtis-like chased by fret sirens — visceral termites gnawing at the cooling skin of the song.
A gentle dip into flickering ambience breaks the tension in the form of “At Poseidon’s Beach”, a lower case Sargasso withering into a ribbon of migratory starlings, tourmalined rotaries that set you up afresh for the brilliant “Dare”. A song that takes the adrenaline of “Afraid of Heights”‘ machined edgings and repurposes them onto a pounding foetal ultrasound as the vox oxidises on iridescent guitars that seem to be pulling at reddening scabs.
It’s deliciously dark, forlorn fayre, bristling with brittle rhythmics that stab attentively. Cross-cut in textures that brew up plenty of energy and suck you into deciphering the lyrical mysteries that run though it all like a pivoting skewer. “Keen”’s guitar yarnings casting shadows over the sobering half-lit delivery like a tangled forest dripping with its frustrations. The “Asphalt Smell” is another highpoint which kicks out the tempo like a spinster-winged runaway chewing over some manic episode, hotly pursued by a weird howling underbelly and beats scarred in guzzling electronics. Electronics that continue on “Thread” in a drool of elastic and wincing wavelengths succumbed by the echo-chambered stagger that plays buzzsaws with your brainbox.
By the time everything signs off with a Jesus and Mary Chain homage that is “Out of My Mind”, you’re left with a definite need to re-immerse as Pan yells incoherently from the centre of the carnage and the whole caboodle finally grinds to an abrupt halt.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
