That guttural bleakness punctuated by a lone-slap of reverbed timpani is impressive — a real sit up and listen asthetic tied to a wine-glass hum and a circle of Galás gulls that drag you into a ritualised scrape of brutalist electronics and scatter-cushioned skin.
Lay In The Salt Of The Soil‘s opener “Yet I Am” fills me with same the primal shivers I felt when I first heard The Flowers Of Romance by PiL, and that tasty roll of metal on concrete and the concentrated percussives are also indicative of Test Department’s salvaged ethos.
It’s so easy to draw comparisons, but the edge of your seat dramatics here feel afresh, informed by the same injustices that have been circling the world for far too long – yes — but filled with renewed vigour with a vortexed sickly centre to lose yourself in, suddenly cut by whispering voices that arch your head like broken mirrors, then shower you in an abruptly amputated ferocity — what an opener! As the EP moves on, it becomes an enormous raid on the senses – “The Leash” is a dirty jack thump of gothika, the sax rising through, sounding like a distant ambulance lost to the maelstrom. Then the dervished techno abandon of “What Does It Mean, To Be A Man In A Burning World”, a relentless assault akin to “Tanz Mit Laibach” and then some more in an utterly brilliant riot of colour complete with mangled screams.If the first track was a brooding chisel, then this is the hyaena’s bite, and you expect more of the same but are pleasantly surprised by the chiming blunt alarm clocks of “The Salt”, with a tonal wash that locusts your senses in clangy metallics, phonetically funnel-fed into the last track’s tense narrative broken in bursts of controlled violence.
LONESAW’s debut is as strikingly original document — Lay In The Salt Of The Soil is a solid take on “industrial” that’s incendiary, insightful and a law unto itself.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
