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Vessel, "Punish, Honey"
I have been following Vessel since 2012's Order of Noise album, as Seb Gainsborough always seemed like one of the most consistently compelling and distinctive forces in Bristol’s Livity Sound/Young Echo scene.  Somehow, however, his albums always fell just short of being something I could get truly excited about.  Punish, Honey admittedly continues that trend in some ways, but it is a huge evolution in others, as Gainsborough has largely untangled himself from current underground dance trends and embraced some very unhinged, adventurous, and heavy new textures.
Vessel's impressive transformation from techno to the fringe-y outer limits is amply apparent within the very first minute of Punish, Honey, as the brief "Febrile" launches into a snare roll that sounds like an actual, untreated drum kit before exploding into full-on jackhammer industrial chaos.  Gainsborough tones down the violence with the first "real" song ("Red Sex"), but compensates with an inspired juxtaposition of machine noise rhythms; a slinky, lurching tom-tom beat; and a very warped-sounding synth hook.  To his eternal credit, Seb somehow finds a way to make his synth sound even more spectacularly wrong for a mid-song interlude.  The overall effect resembles a weirdly anthemic take on Love’s Secret Domain-era Coil or something that would be played at a strip club in a sci-fi dystopia.  While, "Red Sex" is not particularly representative of the rest of the album stylistically, it is nevertheless a strong and clear statement of intent: Gainsborough seems both actively intent on subverting expectations and utterly indifferent to the possible alienation of his previous fan-base.  The gauntlet has been thrown down: Punish, Honey is absolutely not going to be just another techno album in any conventional sense.
The rest of the album is spent ingeniously twisting Vessel's core sound into unexpected new forms.  For example, "Drowned in Water and Light" marries deep bass throb with melancholy groaning strings and a harsh metallic shimmer to create something resembling a ritualistic funeral march. ""Euoi," on the other hand, sounds like blown-out, overdriven, and fractured minimalism set to a stumbling, slow-motion groove.  Another stand-out is "Anima," which initially sounds like rolling, thumping twist on Suicide before its simple, thick synth motif is gradually subsumed by layers and layers of counter-melodies and electronics.  Bizarrely, it transforms into fairly straightforward '90s industrial dance at one point, before transforming yet again into something that sounds like an English folk dance played backwards through a pile-up of studio effects.  Perhaps the finest moments on the album, however, belong to "Black Leaves and Fallen Branches," which reprises the "ritualistic funeral march" aesthetic of "Drowned," but beautifully echoes the main melody with textures that sound distant, surreal, and extra-dimensional.  It certainly has some lulls, but its high points are singularly, gloriously fucked in all the right ways.
For all its brilliance, "Black Leaves and Fallen Branches" is also a piece that highlights the only real flaw with Punish, Honey: Seb's talents as a composer currently lag a bit behind his other gifts.  Despite its audacious and wonderfully crazy ideas, wild sounds, and beautifully realized textures and arrangements, this album is curiously lacking in great songs to show for it: there are plenty of momentum-sapping lulls between highlights and nearly every song feels more like a vamp based upon a single great motif than a composition with serious depth.  That said, Punish, Honey nevertheless wildly exceeded my expectations in nearly every other way, as I never would have expected Seb to turn out anything quite as singular and forward-thinking as this.  I would not exactly say that I was blown out of my chair when I first put this album on, but my eyes definitely widened immediately and had to check to make sure that I was actually listening to a Vessel album (I was).  It may not be quite perfect, but Punish, Honey is a massive, attention-grabbing leap forward for Gainsborough.
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