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Terminal Sound System, "Compressor"
Skye Klein opens Compressor with the furious bitch-slap of reversed bass, cracking snares, and an ominous array of machine noise perverse enough to warrant comparison to Venetian Snares. "Gridlike" is melodic, catchy, and vicious in its delivery, a near perfect combination of song-writing and sonic attitude. Klein tries to maintain that intensity for 48 minutes and almost succeeds.
Extreme
"Clip Incident" had me very excited. I was convinced that Klein was actually capable of topping the awesome power of "Gridlike" by expanding what it delivered in five minutes over the course of an entire album. "Gridlike" was to be the watermark against which the rest of the album could be compared: a slow burn of rhythmic chaos and uncomfortable synthetic groans. As "Clip Incident" came to a close I found myself a little worried; the music began to wander and any sense of identifiable structure began to slip away. "722" reaffirmed my belief that this record would grow on me over time. Its slow and nearly jazzy beginnings were vividly atmospheric, relaxing, and just a little menacing. I imagined a thousand crickets carrying chainsaws, the sound of their lullaby turned into a nightmarish drone, and their typical appetite substituted for human flesh.
I turned out the lights and turned up the volume and went along with the music, expecting to be menaced but not terrified... only to be surprised by the gunfire Skye unleashed at certain points during the song. There wasn't much melody and at points the track meandered here and there, but I was kept enthralled by how versatile the song was. Klein has a way of constructing tunes such that they can bend and shape them in any number of ways without risking coherency. Unfortunately, in making these tunes so amorphous, Klein also sacrifices his songs and focuses solely on mood. This would not be disappointing if it weren't for the fact that "Gridlike" happens to be a near perfect marriage of songwriting and spirit. Nevertheless, I sat listening to the record fairly enthralled and happily dreaming up any number of seedy deals gone awry, an entire underworld of quick glances and heavy breathing opened up, but was not too last in my imagination.
"Ghost Summer" is fantastic but represents the last truly spectacular song on the record. As Compressor moves through each of its remaining four songs, my attention begins to waver and for some reason I find it easy to push the record into the background. On the other hand listening to each of these tracks on their own is a treat; they all stand out in various ways without the other tracks getting in the way. The album is neither too long nor too short, it simply sounds flat after repeated listens because many of the songs sound like extensions of each other or like inferior versions of each other. If this had been released as an EP with only the first four songs, I'd probably be showering it with accolades. As it stands, I'm impressed on the whole with the relatively minor complaint that some of these songs seem derivative of each other or like unnecessary restatements. "Black Note" is a fine song on its own, but "Clip Incident" does the exact same thing with better results. So goes most of the album, but I don't want to slam it on the whole. Skye Klein has been making music for a long time and Compressor is indicative of some experimentation, the first steps of which are just slightly awkward.
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