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Reanimator, "Special Powers"
The vibrations these two anonymous musicians produce are deep enough to cause strong sexual arousal, as alien as the technology of a visiting spacecraft, and heavy like the boot of an enemy on your throat. Special Powers is littered with a spectrum of styles, the moods shifting from cold and technological to dirty and carnal fluidly. The beats pound like war drums at times and at others they come to form simple, minimal grooves that pulse and groan with all the twitching, robotic life of a science-fiction novel.
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It's hard not to think of the future when Special Powers begins. Telephone tones beep mechanically over the deep, spacious pulse of a bass drum hurled through the cosmos and programmed by a tribe of warring, digital aliens convinced that Voyager was a threat sent from some distant, though mostly harmless, planet. When the orchestra of unknown oscillations begin to buzz like electronic trumpets, trombones, and tubas, it's difficult not to think that Reanimator travelled into the future and brought back some unfamiliar technology with which to make this music. The truth, however, is quite the opposite. Each of these eight tracks were constructed from well-known drum machines, old oscillators, simple guitar pedals, tape, and budget electronic gadgets. So much for the future, I suppose, but the band's music is captivating, utilizing these now old instruments in a way that still manages to sound like the work of some foreign intelligence.
Pan Sonic fans and those familiar with Terminal Sound System will find a lot to like about Special Powers: there's little doubt of the influence Pan Sonic has had on the band and Terminal Sound System's minimal approach to atmosphere matches right up with Reanimator's use of simple, effective backgrounds in their songs. The emphasis of their music exists in the interplay between their steady, scattered beats and the unusual effects they pull out of their machines; some of those effects might count as part of a distant melody and some of them are more reminiscent of the noises employed in movies. "Eat the Magic Toast," for instance, is both propulsive and uneasy, marrying the two elements together in a blurry fusion of synthetic, brass washes of sound and cracking percussion. "Blow Subidah," on the other hand, is three solid minutes of being beaten about the head with a baseball bat. A simple, repetitive, catchy beat rips through the song as various bass effects quake above and below it, sounding like an earthquake captured by subterranean microphones and then run through an array of machines. The band gravitates between these two approaches, opting to emphasize one element one minute and another the next.
There's an air of craziness about the entire album, too, as if the machines the band used suddenly came to life of their own accord and began to flail about violently in their new-found consciousness: it's sensory overload at times, as on "Special Powers" or "No Dancing." All of the elements of the songs will, at times, come together to form a single maniacal moment whose duration is just long enough to scramble grey matter and rearrange it in an uncomfortable manner. However this is accomplished, either by mania or by subtle, creeping insistence, the material is consistently involving and powerful stuff.
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