Gold Class (Photo by Sara Retallick)
This week’s new music round-up finds Getintothis’ Patrick Clarke battling the festival flu with help from some bludgeoning Houston electronica, theatrical post-punk and harsh, industrial hyper-minimalism.
I was at Green Man Festival this weekend, and by a combination of unremitting Welsh drizzle, The Antlers turning me into an emotional wreck and a four-day drug-laden sucker-punch to my immune system, the recovery this week has left me feeling, to borrow a quote, like a pig shat in my head.
The festival flu struggle is real. Through a haze of cold sweats, dizzy spells and the mental ghosts of a comedown, the washed-out platitudes of the majority of the week’s new finds really aren’t doing the trick, which is perhaps why Melbourne trio MY DISCO‘s latest airing from their upcoming album Severe, their first in five years and released this October 30, feels so vitally important in its agressive, bleak, industrial hyper-minimalism.
The track, King Sound, seizes on juxtaposition, simmering in a deathly ring of quiet before leaping to a violent cascade of bludgeoning drums, still terrifying in their sparseness but for screeches of feedback. Concluding on a doomy refrain of the track’s title, they’re harsh to the extreme, and just what the doctor ordered.
Their fellow Melbournians Gold Class are a more straightforward listen (though were our next tune a Trout Mask Replica outtake you could make the same transition), with Furlong, the second track to appear from next month’s debut album It’s You finding a more traditional grounding in the opulent gloom of post-punk past and present.
A tighter, more complete affair than preceding single Life as a Gun, instrumentally the foursome stride a fiery, if not quite original line with surges of bass and pumping scratches of Savages guitar, yet what elevates them is frontman Adam Curley. Off-kilter in all the right ways, his voice melds Morrisey theatrics with an Ian Curtis echo that commands and engages with supreme effect.
Houston producer Rabit, finally, is also gearing up for a debut album release with Communion on October 30, and with Pandemic, the LP’s first preview, we’e back on headspinning ground. A grinding introductory whirl of feedback and found sound is a relative pleasantry for the first thirty seconds, until a cataclysm of bombarding, colliding and jarring textures implodes with gut-wrenching power.
Rising and falling in jagged leaps and drops, the track’s a broken rollercoaster of tones that frazzle the mind in hurling thuds, the adrenaline rocketing again and again at ever-narrowing intervals until a machine-gun assault of a claustrophobic intensity unparallelled by just about anything else out there.
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