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The Dead C, "Future Artists"
The first new album in several years from this New Zealand trio is a patiently unfurling behemoth that finds them veering between loose rock songs and all-out improvised noise. It is a riveting excursion into shadowy lands of unknown destination, with little to disrupt the veil of gloom.
The cheekily named "The AMM of Punk Rock" starts with doom-laden, low-end rumbles that cook slowly, roasting over a pit of electronics. A recurring beep brings to mind an emergency vehicle pulling up to the scene of an accident and finding the cars flipped with their wheels still spinning, their engines churning and croaking undulating waves of feedback, and the drivers mysteriously vanished. Following this dark voyage is the album's shortest song and its most structured, "The Magicians." Here, rhythm guitar, vocals, and a steady beat grounds the song while a second guitar clatters and crashes behind them at a distance, if only to shield the others from its blistering, scattered attack until the drums answer in the machine gun finale.
"Macoute" drags bass notes and static across the floor during its frazzled intro before returning with the ruffled noises of strangled machinery: a warped, shifting pulse takes center, eventually giving way to high-pitched wailing and a few evolving textures before ending in decay. This abstraction alternates with "Eternity," whose recurring beat returns the album to solid ground. The guitars accumulate into a mixture of unassuming riffs, feedback, and crackling gestures that compels the song forward until achieving a hazy moment of solidarity with the drums.
The only time on this otherwise excellent album that seems wasted is the beginning of its longest track, "Garage," whose first ten minutes of hissing electronics, random squeals, and tentative guitar noodling makes it sound like the band is being captured during an uninspired practice. However, the second half of the song is fantastic as the drones, strums, and feedback all start to work together and join the drums for one last hypnotic session before the album ends.
An album this consistently enjoyable and unpredictably unsettling is well worth the wait, and the improvisations herein are enough to satisfy strange appetites for a long time to come.
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