Mouthus, "For the Great Slave Lakes"

On this album, howling electronics, pulsing bass distortions, and hordes of junkyard rhythms churn incessantly like some alien, insectoid race spewing parasitic aural spores into the ears of the unwary. As insidiously as these tracks crawl beneath the skin, infection is inevitable.

 

Three Lobed

The music is relentless from the beginning, immersing me in an acoustic world born of various detritus scavenged from sewers, dimly lit alleyways, or heaps of litter. It seems that anything found in these locales is fair game for making rhythm, from trashcans to generators and barely functional machine parts. Conventional drums appear in some places, yet their role is to punctuate the chaos more than to provide a steady beat around which the other noises rally. Occasionally, one of the denizens disturbed by this din rises from its lair to lament the pillaging or to frighten the intruders away. The epic closer "Compound My Eyes" is itself a test in endurance at over 40 minutes in length, and separates the dilettantes from the devotional. Because each song uses such similar compositional elements, after a while the album begins to sound like variations of a theme, but oh, what an intriguing and addictive theme it is.