Wreck and Reference- No Youth(2012)

 

Wreck and Reference- No Youth

Deconstructive, ethereal, dripping with a noxious mix of disgust and listlessness, No Youth is this years sound-track of total defeat.  The California twosome of Wreck and Reference have been rolling on a pretty big hype machine since their demo Black Cassette, but No Youth is a different monster entirely.  It heralds the arrival of one of Extreme Music's new titans while exemplifying the limitless potential of a project devoid of barriers, genres and fear.  No Youth is a Universe of sound that expands beyond the horizon into reaches of the void that have rarely, if ever, been tread.  I don't want to use too much hyperbole: No Youth is a triumph of an album and easily one of the best records released this year and this decade, but in and of itself it might not reach the truly hallowed lands of immortality.  What makes No Youth so completely fascinating is the aforementioned formlessness of the album and the fearlessness of the song-writing.  No idea was too big or intimidating for the band, yet the album remains focused, controlled and melancholic. No Youth is the ultimate piece of cathartic expression and flawless craftsmanship.

It's utterly amazing to think that No Youth is an entirely electronic album, considering the massive drone and deluge of static and feedback that comes whirling and whipping from the speakers.  If we are moving into a future of purely electronic music, then No Youth may be a defining release, though the bombastic, explosive drumming on the record keeps it grounded in the real and tangible.  The percussion here is massive and powerful, thundering across the tracks and keeping the often dream-like compositions drowned in hopeless reality.  "Nausea," easily my favorite track on the record, is a perfect example: a slow, Drone intro gives way to an almost oil-and-water mix of slow, ethereal Swans-esque madness driven by thundering Darkthrone-style blast beats.  I can honestly say I have never heard such a dynamic combination of sounds before, and No Youth is over-flowing with these odd, exhilarating moments.

If there is any obvious influence on No Youth and Wreck and Reference in general, it has to be the Swans.  "If" being the key word, but there are a handful of similarities: the utter hopelessness of the vocals and lyrics and the mostly short, concise tracks that still drip atmosphere and anger were both trademarks of Michael Gira's signature project, and both elements are featured prominently on No Youth.  But so is the deluge of static-y, dense Drone/Doom, and at times Wreck and Reference effectively mix both, such as on "Cannot," which dances between somber, dark spoken word poetry to soul-siophoning Doom.  Once again, everything meshes so flawlessly that this seemingly awkward approach to songwriting feels completely natural and focused.  The atmosphere of self-hatred and melancholy remains wholly intact, no matter how ferocious of defeated the music gets.

No Youth is a damn difficult album to talk about: it's easy to heap praise on it, yet tough to pin down  Genre classifications are very hard to come by listening to No Youth, and trying to prepare a listener for the experience is near impossible.  No Youth is an album that just kind of has to be experienced, and the outcome of the experience will be colored by the one who lives it.  No doubt some will find all the sopping wet depression and self-inflicted damage as overkill, or even a bit silly.  Others will be touched deeply by it, and relate with the hopelessness and cathartic intensity of the album.  I can say unequivocally that No Youth is not for everyone.  It's not accessible, rarely melodic and never fun.

It all comes down to craftsmanship and creativity.  Some have one, some have the other and a rare few albums have both.  No Youth clearly has both.  The natural barrier of entry in how dark and defeated the moans and tones No Youth features leads to tough sailing even for the heartened and curious.  No doubt some will be unable to make it into the deeper layers of No Youth.  I can't say that I blame them.  But for the most masochistic, driven listeners among us, No Youth is a can't miss album.  It's an album that doesn't even feel like it ever had any boundaries in the first place, guided only by an unseen hand which dutifully orchestrates the madness and sorrow into a handful of notes and lyrics that evoke a sickened spirit of humanity.

Rating: 10/10

Sutekh Hexen - Larvae (2012)

Sutekh Hexen - Larvae

Now, I'm a fan of Sutekh Hexen. I like all of their previous releases. If you listened to them, you would know that they're pretty much noisy black metal riffs and...noise. But the previous releases were somewhat harsh and actually had some black metal in them; you could hear the black rasps and drums and whatnot, but this time, it’s much more subtle, transendental, melancholic. Now of course it has plenty of black metal and noise, but it’s less obvious here, since it’s all a haze of noise to the “unexperienced” ear.

The first track, “Isvar Savasana,” is a track composed of poignant synths, noisy drones, and remote guitar notes in the background. The distorted vocals build up along with the guitar sounds until it all crashes into a void of black noise. This is also a proof that production helps noise artists as well: if it was shitty on this track, this would end up as a wall of ugly noise that does nothing but random clamor. Instead, you have a dynamic arena of demonic vocals, drums and riffs, walls of blissful static, and other black noise paraphernalia. This sense is what helps the record from failing into an ugly salad of random noise.

The second track, “Lead Us in Warfare,” also the shortest one, opens with a doom-like riff and noise, and then aptly changes into a martial rhythm with high distorted vocals and crushing bass. The track plods in a lugubrious pace and creates the sense of a battlefield. The combination of the vocals and bass here sounds like some broken military equipment while its surroundings are being bombarded into oblivion. The vocals fade out, and the bass lingers on some more. Felicitous primordial audio-terror.

The third and final track, “Let There Be Light,” is the zenith. Dolorous and mournful, it brings forth stark and grim walls of bleak winters. At first, the track evokes a sense of an eternal and frostbitten winter, with forlorn chants and howls, until it breaks into flaring riffs accompanied with noise that slowly include a void-like guitar riff. It clearly shows that Sutekh Hexen knows its black noise and how to aptly deal with juxtaposed black metal and noise.

Larvae is an interesting album, to say the least. It’s a meditation in chaos, with many ideas and layers, that most of them have been executed well enough. Naturally, it has some flaws: some points aren’t clear enough, other ones aren’t engaging enough, many parts with generic studio pitch corrections, not enough awe-inspiring moments, and the likes. But if you like black noise, experimentation, or just need something new in your black metal, you should most definitely give this album a shot.

Rating: 8.5/10

The Curse Quarterly Report

So March is coming to an end, and it's time for a quarterly report of the best albums of 2012 so far. This list will only include Extreme Music releases, and I will be adding a nifty little 8tracks playlist at the end, so if you haven't actually listened to any of the albums I reviewed, you can sample for yourself.

Best Performing(first to last in descending order)

Charon- Sulfur Seraph(The Archon Principle)

Vattnet Viskar- Vattnet Viskar

Plague Widow- Plague Widow

Lord Mantis- Pervertor

Muknal- Muknal

Witch In Her Tomb- Witch In Her Tomb

Axis of Light- By the Hands of Consuming Fire

Spawn of Possession- Incurso

Locrian & Mamiffer- Bless Them That Curse You

Desecravity- Implicit Obedience



8Tracks Playlist

Wreck And Reference - Black Cassette (2011)

Note: This review was originally posted at Court In The Act, and any reference made to any facets of a blog is linked to that blog.

Due to technology, this EP (released on cassette – hence the name – through Music Ruins Lives) has been sitting in my inbox unnoticed for several months. For that, I apologize. From the name of the band, one might guess that they played post-something, and you’d be sort of right – the influence which jumps out instantly to me is Jesu, in the shimmering semi-industrial shoegazey sense. Jesu are always better on EPs due to their albums becoming boring over their full duration, and I suppose this is the same.

                                 

The aforementioned elements create quite a haunting ambient effect – but despite wholly miserable lyrics, the music is uplifting to some degree; consider the musical form of being haunted by a nice ghost who sings melodically rather than attempting to scare people. However, at times the raw production makes it somewhat difficult to discern individual melodies, particularly when notes used are chromatically close to each other. Although this rawness gives a warm feeling – like that of an LP – overall it probably strays far enough to slightly detract from the music. That said, it’s a cassette release, and therefore one should not expect outstanding production.

A point of particular similarity with Jesu in particular as opposed to many other practitioners of this kind of music is the choice to use something roughly resembling popular structure (verse-chorus-verse or variations thereon), particularly on the pleasing opener ‘All The Ships Have Been Abandoned’. The vocal approach, however, which is integral to the quality of the music, as many of the instrumental patterns are a little uninspired, is more similar to that utilised by SubRosa (although from my guess the vocalist here is male). Unfortunately, for the most part they sound a little frail – and in a way that is more weak than ‘woe is me’, something which is particularly evident when they are brought to the forefront of the music by quieter instrumentation.

Speaking of the instrumentation, the email from the band, as well as the label’s website, informed me that no guitars were used in the creation of this, which they are still calling ‘rock music’ (a tag that I would loosely agree with). To be honest, I really don’t see the point in bringing this to our attention. The timbre of one of the instruments used (presumably one of the synthesisers mentioned) sounds so much like an electric guitar (a matter that the mucky production aids little to clear up) that it may as well be one. I’m not criticizing the use of alternate instruments, more so the particular highlighting of this factor which has so little effect it ultimately amounts to little more than a gimmick.

An unusual, but effective, use is made of the juxtaposition of what, at the end of the day, is inherently catchy music (although one would struggle to call any of the motifs and melodies used strictly ‘poppy’, they lean that way at times) with industrial (we’re talking Throbbing Gristle, not Combichrist here) and noise elements in middle eight sections. This blends smoothly rather than clashes awkwardly as one would expect – a true success on their behalf, and something that’s not really been done before (no, Merzbeat doesn’t count).

There is a fine line to be trod between suffocating emotion and tedium in music, and Wreck And Reference manage to trample haphazardly on both sides of that line with roughly equal proportion. Where their style works, it moves towards ‘stunning’, but there are simply too many sections of the EP where I’m looking at the second hand on the clock to justify too much positivity about the good parts. The same feeling comes from some of the odd diversions they go on in the EP – they’re of decidedly mixed quality, and some leave a jarring effect and hamper the continuity of the individual piece or the EP as a whole.

A good last track on a release is probably more conducive to wishes to listen to it again than any other track – that last impression is a lasting one, and fortunately the closer here, ‘A Lament’, is the standout track. The drones and synths bring a shimmering quality to it, and the vocals come across as sufficiently strained to introduce some real heart-ripping emotion to it. This may be so, but many other sections of the EP go through the mind as though it were a sieve, and although this EP shows promise, and future Wreck And Reference releases could be something indeed, to those with a busy listening schedule it’s definitely one that can be passed on with no harm done.