By: Stephen Murray
Album Type: Full
Length
Date Released: 30/03/2018
Label: Dry Cough
Records |
Rope And
Guillotine
Taken altogether, the vacillation between violence and misery is
compelling
“Neon Crosses” DD//LP track listing:
1). Sacrosanct
2).
Halogen
3). Tar
4). Razor
Nest
The Review:
It’s not
that I would nail myself to the masochist mast, but I have to admit there is
something ritualistically cleansing about laying down in a dark room, depriving
all senses except hearing, and shattering that peaceful seclusion with a high
volume deluge of grisly, bone-biting aural violence. Despite the horrific grime
one is subjected to, the effect is one of paradoxical cleanliness and peace.
But for the ritual to work it must be pure; nothing watered down into a
thin, homeopathic tincture; it must be something viscous and foul-tasting that
lets you know that you’ve been medicined, a spiking that lets you know you’ve
been spoken to. If you need this treatment as much as I do, then “Neon
Crosses” is your draught.
This is Leechfeast’s first full-length for five years
(their second overall), and their first release since the split with New
Zealand's now defunct grime lords Meth Drinker
back in 2015. Perhaps significantly, this is the first recording since Hans
Wubs took over the sticks from Marko Šajn in an otherwise remarkably consistent
line-up since their nascence in 2010.
As the
title suggests, it cuts an urban path. For Slovenia’s Leechfeast, the children of the
night are not wolves, but other predators skulking between the streetlights.
They represent the mould growing in the gutters, the weeds pushing through the
concrete, blackened foil in the alleys and the screams of victims slapping back
off wet brick, steel and glass.
At first
harken, I quickly understand why comparisons have been drawn between “Neon
Crosses” and the excoriating sounds of Cough
and Moss, but it is no carbon copy.
Instead, the band manage to steer their sound safely across the ever busier
shipping lanes of modern doom, deftly avoiding collision with the other
lumbering tankers which seem to be riding in each other’s wakes.
An
example of this subtle divergence comes on the second track, ‘Halogen’. Its linchpin riff is like
someone heartlessly slinging on a string of Reggie
Dixon numbers when you're too goofed to intervene, leaving you to be
waltzed through to some dreadful other dimension.
Highlight
song, ‘Razor Nest,’ well positioned
at the end of the record, opens with gloomily melodic, reverb-washed singing,
drawing parallels with 40 Watt Sun,
except with all the hope for tomorrow extinguished. Then despair gives way to
anger once more and the vocals lash out again, the guitars moving from minors
to chromatics, the whole peppered with samples from what sounds to be space age
American public information films. The effect is that of a broken emergency
broadcast system piping messages exhorting calm which echo through the empty
streets of a post-neutron bombed world.
At no
point does “Neon Crosses” feel protracted, each of the eight to ten
minute tracks is extremely well judged; the bars allotted to the changing riffs
and motifs is perfect and the sound achieved in the studio and in
post-production is crisp, capturing some of that high-end fizz that gives
character to otherwise bass rich guitar tone and slow skin pummeling.
The
record invokes that horrid yet splendid feeling of your flesh being torn from
you in long, misshapen strips, and then dresses the wounds in melancholic,
chant-like singing and single picked guitar lines more apt to surrendering to
the darkness than exalting it. Taken altogether, the vacillation between
violence and misery is compelling. Would definitely recommend for your next
isolation tank session
“Neon Crosses” is
available here
