Earth Ball – It’s Yours

Upset The Rhythm

As ever, Upset The Rhythm are cooking with gas and this team-up with the Pacific north-western auto composition monstrosity Earth Ball has me hanging out the flags, wondering when British Columbia morphed into early ’80s NYC, and how this riot of slow sleaze and heavy workouts escaped my attention until now.

The group, with its wild sax blasts and rusted-door guitars laid over industrial-grade rhythms, know how to shed light on darkness. As I was listening to this, two dogs outside the flat were trying to tear into one another and that kind of delirious two-tone barking was a perfect accompaniment.

It is about mania and exuberance with a touch of James Chance in the sax’s restless searching as it veers down sordid streets, a constant flow of irresistible energy firing across the bows of the deep, deep rhythm section. In places, drums and bass scuffle with one another as the sax oversees, turning apoplectic with rage or desire. It is hard to tell which bit the dark energy is ever present, rolling around on the edge of something as a voice appears smeared and frustrated, a lonesome passenger on this stricken ghost train.

The guitars meanwhile tickle and flicker, simmering in an unhinged vat of what the female vocal might consider disgust or contempt. Here, abstract textures lessen the noise but continue with the tension. It seethes and shivers, the buzz of angry wasps flicking around your head as the rest of the band try to rustle up something unmentionable for the balance of the side.

I kept imagining that what I was hearing is what might happen if somebody kidnapped the B52s, got the band drunk and started slowly torturing them. It is not so much post-punk as post-apocalyptic, with rhythm crawling from flaming wreckage, a spiral of unsteady guitar body-slamming the bass and drums as the voices taunt and tease.

They also do their abstraction well, bass drums and synth alarms going off like a too-late warning. It all sounds appalled and offended, realising the only way to put things right (or wrong) is to start up a lumbering beat around which sax cavorts and voices intone. It’s Yours ends up dragging the listener under the wheels of the juggernaut with some kind of vicious relish as guitars unspool in the background.

It feels so good to unwind to this sort of thickening stew and UTR have performed a public service in drawing the work of these Canadian agonising antagonisers to the wider public. An ear-scouring plunge from start to finish that noise lovers and noisy lovers alike will relish.

-Mr Olivetti-