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Mikaela's Fiend, "We Can Driving Machine"
With the sleeve featuring portraits of grandparents and great grandparents, it is easy to think that We Can Driving Machine will be soft on the ears. The opening piece (none of the tracks have titles) is a scratchy recording of an old lady singing about nightingales. The cuddly grandmother theme led me into a false sense of security and I was totally unprepared for the sheer chaos that ensued. The rest of the album hurtles out of the speakers like a comet; it is a seriously heavy adventure.
SAF
From the second they start, they pummel my ears into submission. Mikaela’s Fiend are Chris on guitar and Donnie on drums (no second names are given). Donnie provides no-nonsense testosterone-drenched drumming and Chris fills out the sound with a massive amount of guitar for one man. It sounds like he’s running the guitar through a couple of amps with different effects simultaneously. Some of the processing knocks the signal out of key to cause dissonance and beating which give the music a lot more power and aggression. On the fourth track, this effect is particularly evident. The guitar seems to be coming from both sides with the drums centred in the mix, pinning me to my seat.
There isn’t a single track, barring the grandmother intro, that doesn’t hit me like a ton of bricks being fired from a cannon. The pace is kept high throughout the album, only dropping the odd time for Mikaela’s Fiend to show that they can do Melvins-esque sludgy treacle too. The shortness of the tracks (most are between one and four minutes) and the variety of the playing gives We Can Driving Machine a lot of life. Each piece is a burst of pure energy, it’s impossible not to get up and move to the music. However he messed up rhythms make it impossible to move sensibly to the music.
The tinnitus from enjoying the CD at an appropriate volume is not welcome, however, this is a fucking great album that I can’t easily turn off or down.
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