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Final, "Dead Air"
For his installment in the Utech URSK series, Justin Broadrick's earliest project channels some of his older dark ambient work under that moniker, but also brings up some of his earliest days of harsh noise and power electronics as well, making for some of the rawest Final work that he’s released yet.
Utech
The overdriven bass crunch and inorganic feedback that opens "Slow Air" is definitely in league with the early Whitehouse and other power electronics bands that influenced a 13 year old Broadrick into starting his own project, which later reappeared in the mid 1990s as a dark ambient/isolationist project. It doesn’t rise to painful levels, but stays raw and sludgy.
Both "Caved" and "Disordered" stay in this noisy domain, the former based on shrill blasts of noise and slowly flanged squeals while the latter stays crunchy and rhythmic, while pulses of white noise and feedback shows up. It’s not an entirely harsh work at all, but definitely is rough and murky, even by Final’s standards.
"Fearless Systems” is more of a mixed piece, there’s overdriven pulses and analog crunches, but there is also delicate, pure guitar playing that eventually begins to make itself known, a bit of beautiful sticking the muck and mire of clipping noise. While the album as a whole does tend to focus on the darker and grimier elements, they don’t stay in the noisier territory the whole time.
The bass heavy and metric ton of reverb on "Subterrane" feels largely reminiscent of the 1990s Final output, especially 2, which remains one of my all time personal favorite dark ambient releases, though the stabs of feedback and guitar make it feel a bit different, and the digital sheen on it reflects the ten years of technological growth since then. The swarming, alien insect chirps of "Inanimate Air" also wouldn’t be out of place on some of Broadrick’s earlier experimental works.
The closing title track is the most subtle of them all, a more sparse recording of melancholy tones that close the album on a distinctly somber note. Personally, I think this is a more diverse and varied recording than some of the more recent output, including the somewhat patchy Three album. While not quite the greatness that was 2, or the Urge/Fail 7", it is still a great disc, regardless.
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