Here's another one by an assemblage of which I was in complete ignorance this time last year, more noise, and yet somehow nothing like the previous offering. I'm not really significantly wiser than I was with 2019's Die Robot, aside from having discovered that +DOG+ have been at it for two full decades, and that one of them was in Big City Orchestra. Annoyingly, this leaves me with very little to write about other than the actual music, but never mind. I'll do my best.
As I probably said, I'm sort of familiar with noise - or have been at various points of my life - but usually as something more overtly confrontational than Helpless; not that Helpless isn't harsh as fuck, but there's a lot of other stuff going on too. Die Robot seemed to carry some sort of narrative, albeit one which was probably equivalent to patterns seen while staring into a fire. This one seems to do the same sort of thing but with less to go on. Vocals are infrequent, usually distorted beyond recognition, leaving us with just titles, so whatever it communicates is effectively something beyond language. that said, the album draws you in and carries you along just the same. There's a sense of progression or at least evolution and it leaves the listener with an impression of having understood something, even if I'm not sure how to describe what that seems to be.
Yes, you may well ask, but what does the fucker sound like?
A lot of it sounds like coffee poured into rudimentary electronic circuitry as someone rummages around with a screwdriver, yet producing a much wider range of noises than you might anticipate, with different tones of distorted racket clearly divided and complementing each other in terms which seem almost musical. Occasional feedback intrudes, or what sounds like a drum kit undergoing demolition, or reversed vocals, or organ chords clipped to electronic sludge; then for the sake of contrast we get a few bars of She's So Fine, and finally Torpor in which the noise struggles to hold notes and which I suppose you might be justified in calling stadium mains hum.
These ten tracks could be unrelated pieces, but they surely fit together too well for it to be entirely accidental, forming a powerful, almost symphonic slab of raw texture which reveals more and more of itself with each listen. I am genuinely knocked out by what I'm hearing of this bunch.
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