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Death Unit, "Only Death is Certain"
In these musically incestuous days it seems like underground improv super groups are meeting up in every inner-city basement. Most of these team-ups come and go in a pleasant enough pot and beer fuelled assault on the senses, but rarely give do they give glimpses like this into group dynamics. Despite this band’s apparent bleak worldview (evident in the song titles and collective name) this is a generously equal musical and unstereotypically focused offering. This is a band working towards one musical goal under the focus of four very different spotlights.
The team up of Chris Corsano, Carlos Giffoni, Brian Sullivan (Mouthus) and Trevor Tremaine (Hair Police) looks on paper like the meeting of remarkable minds. Yet unlike many other random get-togethers of underground this looks like its naturally gelled right of the bat. There’s an overlap in the different territories of these players and this is why Death Unit works as well as it does. Two drummers, a guitarist and an abuser of electronics may not seem like the most easily workable group set-up, but these biomechanical moves come together like the biggest, baddest Decepticon ever built.
For all the unshackled elements and the often-careering pace, both "Scum" and "AIDS Death 666" are perfectly formed for all their rough edges; this is the only way to experience a downhill dash in a freewheeling flaming tank outside of Baghdad. Only Death is Certain comes wrapped in Frank Miller style bloody splatter text and this gives a boost to the mindset of a slickly aggressive world of noir improv. These heavyweight up and comers find an equilibrium that allows all four to flex their muscles and sharpen their teeth, but instead of straining against each other they’re all pushing one way. Giffoni’s pinpoint skill for precision breakdowns balances Trevor Tremaine’s sickened noise outbursts and Sullivan and Corsano lead and back each other into disassociative grooves.
The controlled demolition of "AIDS Death 666" throbs with backed up sine curving energy, tracks spinning for a grip on something, anything. The cymbal storms may precede an electronic meltdown, but the drums are never to far from a formal pattern, even it is formation ram raiding. Both songs run a loose live take on the Carter/Christopherson interface that melted the lines between rhythm and greasy noise, and here the drums take wide loops getting louder as they go.
On the opening "Smut" the sinewy feedback intro is coaxed into an off kilter peal until the digital sounds overtake it. This electronic rip is stretched so far into the foreground that it’s possible to hear the binary clicks. As the wiring is being wrenched, spilling electric vomit, there are coughing splutters and splurges of percussion; this cooperative work as one mind in channelled brute force. There are melodies in the rise and lunge of the feedback, in the back and forth buckling verging on the lip of freefall. This isn’t your typical jam session.
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