Those of you who’ve been following MXLX (he of Fairhorns, Knife Library, very etc) will know he’s a slippery bugger. His earlier days — mostly characterised by the now-defunct Team Brick project — went through a series of phases, sometimes in the same gig, pulling in stimmy noise, klezmer-after-burial, shouting hardcore, Shaggs-esque lop-sided indie — again very etc.
Latterly he’s pared down his projects into a select few and, for my money, tightened up massively. Not that there was anything wrong with being all over the shop, but albums now tend to be a few ideas in one place, and projects tend to have a specific sound. It’s not converted into the Royal Albert Hall MXLX retrospective carnival, but there’s still time.
Anyway, the point of all that is to say that if you know MXLX, this record shouldn’t come as a surprise. If you don’t, well, you’ll probably want a record that’s somehow a bit screamo, a bit trap, a little funerary and somehow also none of the above. I don’t like using the term sui generis, but there’s not much to pin this on — a couple of influences here and there (baritone Cardiacisms in the vocals). He’s got a masterful, and often inscrutable touch on sonics — “Remove Your Head” clearly has both live and sequenced drums, but the rationale for using either is unclear; elsewhere there’s plenty of existing on the borders between live and sequenced sounds, and plenty of the vocals switch between studio-d choruses to single lines. Nebula Rasa‘s an odd record in that I can imagine a world in which it’d be well popular. There’s bits of melodic sensibilities ceding to almost commercial metal shouting (“Your Morals Are Worthless In The Eye Of A Tree”), stuff that’s well into scramz territory (fleetingly — “The Day I Crawled OUT Of The Sun”). Like I can see a kind of intersection of ex-hardcore kiddies who are now somewhere on that trap / music to smoke to tip digging this hard. This isn’t quite commercial music (far too weird, in many senses), but the elements and the flows are all continuous, make sense and probably should garner him a bigger audience.Possibly the smartest thing in his bifurcating ideas into multiple projects is that there’s a previous iteration where he’d’ve made a record with a track or two that didn’t quite follow the mood of the rest of the record — Nebula Rasa is often a dark record, but it’s got elements of humour and uplifting melodic sensibilities; by contrast, his Knife Library project is pretty much pitch-black, bleak as fuck for days.
tl;dr — banger. Also available on vinyl if you’re a total fuckstand, like me.
-Kev Nickells-
