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The Vomit Arsonist, "Only Red"
On his first full length album since 2013's An Occasion For Death, Andy Grant (The Vomit Arsonist) has crafted a record that clearly shows his influences, but bears his own distinct mark and sound. An extremely aggressive album, it is also an exercise in restraint, resulting in a set of songs that lurch more than assault, but is jam packed with evil and violence that festers dangerously close to the surface.
Much of Only Red was inspired by Grant's tour last year with genre innovators Brighter Death Now, who have made an entire career of presenting extremely sinister and violent noise in a barely restrained, structured capacity.That is the influence that he most clearly employs on this album.The feeling of something horrible happening just below the superficial, held back only through weakening repression and fighting to get out.
Opener "Choice" exemplifies this approach.With an ambience that sounds like reverberations within the concrete and steel of a parking garage, he builds the sound up from a loop, adding tension and dissonance with each passage.Finally, pummeling and crunchy rhythms appear, mixed with heavily processed vocals that are extremely aggressive, yet mixed extremely low."Only Red" comes from a similar scraping, grinding space, with the slow jackhammer beats and screamed voices conveying an undeniable sense of frustration and an urgent need to be heard.
On "It Just Is," Grant employs similar techniques, but at first in a more open, spacious context.The percussive blasts and screamed vocals appear later on, and contrast the less oppressive opening extremely well."I'm Not Fine" slows the rhythms down and buries them in distortion to give the whole piece a distinct fuzzy crunch, occasionally stopping to allow what sounds like a carefully controlled passage of feedback to move to the forefront.
While the mood may not vary greatly from song to song, the structures and compositional methods do."Nothing Matters," a reworking of Hank Williams' "It Just Don't Matter Now," is a sustained roar, heavier on the chugging noise and explosive bursts of sound.With the vocals added, it is an undeniably menacing, vicious piece of music."Unwelcome Peace" has Grant instead opting for a more uncomfortable mood, allowing bits of what sounds like cello to loom amongst strange, menacing noises.
One of the strongest features of Only Red is just how well Grant is at employing the expected sounds of noise and power electronics into a different structure, one with a greater depth and complexity rather than just being pure dissonance.That, coupled with the palpable sense of frustration and anger (but not in the stereotypically destructive framework) that he generates, gives an added depth to an extremely strong record.
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