Ever had one of those fever dreams? The ones where you wake up in cold sweats and disillusion only to discover your sense of clarity skews once more before waking from sleep? Those moments are the most vivid of all dreams, where rapid eye movement seems to fuse into the brain’s inner workings to trick itself for just an instant. It can be beautiful, it can be terrifying, but over all others it evokes pure dread. You notice something is off, and you claw at your eyes to wake from this place.
Disconnected is a tank rolling through the nightmarishly plausible. It slugs along and straddles the line between in-body awareness and feverish insanity as its treads mangle the innocent, punishing its weaker links as its supporters clap in awe. Much like said fever dreams, an unrecognizable discomfort lingers ominously as the machine trudges along. On Greymachine‘s debut full-length, an element of communal slavery is established at the outset of opener “Wolf at the Door,” as its punishing bass line sounds more akin to a sledgehammer etching out fragments of a freshly mangled skull. There’s a word that’s going to be used often in Greymachine articles from now well into the future: Punishing. A word used all too frequently within the realm of extreme music, this is an instance where it is uncannily able to supersede any label concocted by bored, quasi-elitist university students, myself included… See, when the going gets gone, this listen isn’t going to convert anyone. This doesn’t have the staying power of Swans/Jarboe, and it definitely won’t ignite an industrial revolution a la Godflesh. It will frighten metal newcomers and unaware Jesu/Isis fans (likely the hipsters who appreciate the music less for its ambience and atmosphere than for its popularity and influence on the slew of “in” post-metal bands glutting up the frozen corpse of contemporary music) and send them fleeing back to whatever hip publications told them was unique and interesting at this moment in time. This will, however, find its niche. It already has. Think about things this way: Japanese artists Boris slay at a staggering degrees of variation: At one moment they’re frying amps at negative-300 bpm, at another they’re the best psychedelic band this side of Strawberry Alarm Clock, and they still find time to release ambient material as beautiful as a cloudless sky over a sun-swept ocean. In such a similar fashion, Justin Broadrick and Aaron Turner are as diverse and unpredictable as the rumbling tides on said body of water.
Greymachine is composed of members who are or were involved in Isis, House of Low Culture, Old Man Gloom, Jesu, Godflesh, God, and Techno Animal. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of different influences flowing into this release, but it’s really Broadrick’s way of diving back into the world of analog enhanced primal destruction. This is a good thing, but it definitely isn’t Godflesh. Where Godflesh possessed an industrial drone, often repeating and building upon the same one-to-two riff passage in each song (at least during its industrial Streetcleaner era), Greymachine discovers the connection between intrinsically catchy rhythm segments paired alongside a harsh wall of noise and guitar drone. Take, for instance, the soothing drum n’ bass featured in “Wasted,” the lounged-out groove of “When Attention Just Isn’t Enough,” the siren-like wail that drives lead single “Vultures Descend” to its ten minute destination. They are arranged beautifully and in such a manner that they eventually become more than listenable: They become a joy. Vocal histrionics and off-kilter guitar dissonance accompanies layers upon layers of ceaseless static, but in spending time with each distinctive set, unlocks portals into realms beyond shades of grey and oppressiveness. Like the best works by artists such as Aphex Twin, brutality and unbearable noise is paired alongside majestic and otherworldly ambience. There is a world behind this album, but its a world you may have to invest more time into.
Inevitably, this project will whittle down to its iconoclastic image: Turner and Broadrick will fend off tons of reviews that focus exclusively on things like “unbearable oppression” and “bleak iconography.” It’s a shame, however, because this isn’t intended for those reviewers. A listener actively pursuing this record knows exactly what they’re getting themselves into, and there’s no middle ground for such releases. Just as Merzbow transcended from the land of pure obscurity into popular culture, this little project will call attention in due time. Come take a dip into the cathartic sounds of actively turning the cheek toward artistic posturing. This is the sound of the future, as ugly and dirty as that apocalyptic Chernobyl may be.
(8.5/10)
You may also dig: