What does it sound like?:
I posted in the “late to’ thread that I’d managed to escape the charms of Nine Inch Nails. But as both their new EPs are on emusic I’m now in.
Add Violence has five tracks – four of which perhaps are what I might expect from the combination of ‘industrial’ and ‘recent soundtracks to Gone Girl’ might lead everyone to expect. A basic palette of clattering drums, dirty guitar and growling vocals is set out in track one Less Than, which features an epic chorus My Corrosion-era Eldritch would have snapped up. A similar setup is in place for track four, minus the chorus. On the second track this get mixed up a bit. Take away the somewhat windswept vocal about going ‘into the arms of a woman’ and what’s happening is some kind of stuttery Four Tet groove. Track three deconstructs things still further, as a georgeous wobbly keyboard riff is set against wordless vocal sounds until the song decides to evolve as a doomy ballad.
All of this, enjoyable enough, is as an overture to the remarkable final track The Background World. It starts with bubbling synths and a gentle propulsiveness that brings to mind the Mode, and adds a wisp of melody and a chorus built around the refrain ‘is this what you want?’ Then, not yet half-way through, the song starts to eat itself from the inside over seven minutes. A fragment of the chorus is looped over and over, via a brutally timed edit point as the song is buried slowly inside a growing wave of distortion. By the end only the merest echo of the track itself is audible. It’s not the first track to do this, but it is quite brilliantly done. On headphones its quite overwhelming: if Loveless-era MBV played Steve Reich it might sound a bit like this.
What does it all *mean*?
EPs – great place to start with a new artist. Can more do this pls?
Goes well with…
Headphones (for the brave).
Release Date:
Might suit people who like…
Loveless, Floodland
‘Not doing albums’ is slowly but surely becoming a mainstream way of releasing new material. Four Tet is dripping new material out, other people are doing ‘playlists’. I can see an album – as the Raveonettes did too recently – being a way of sweeping up material into one particular format for people who like it that way, rather than a 12-track bi-annual/tri-annual statement of new work.
Back in the 90s when I used to frequent peeler bars the ladies were very fond of this tune.