posted 10/09/2008 (Thu) @ 08:00 am
>>> Music Reviews
Genghis Tron - Board Up The House (2008)
Grindcore / Metal / Electronica
Momentary masters of a fraction of a dot matrix printer
- Board Up The House
- Endless Teeth
- Things Don’t Look Good
- Recursion
- I Won’t Come Back Alive
- City On A Hill
- The Whips
- Blow Back
- Colony Collapse
- The Feast
- Ergot (Relief)
Tick-tick-ti-tickity-tick-tick-tick!
Rickety and ominous digital drum hits, like a waiting, unexploded bomb, signal the reawakening of the warlord’s ghost in the machine from his slumber. A far cry from the head-splitting chaos of “The Folding Road” (from 2006’s Dead Mountain Mouth), Board Up The House’s titular opening track quickly introduces, and chews up, a rolling, repeated three-note figure which forms its melodic and rhythmic base. The conquering Genghis Tron have returned. Those who do not abide the eardrum-rupturing squall of grindcore under normal conditions shall fall on worshipping knees before them as they molest guitar and sampler alike.
Like rave music for people who prefer blood to water, Genghis Tron ratchet between the extremes of outright hellish noise—completely unintelligible lyrics, howled tormentedly like something from the depths of Dante’s Inferno—and a prickly, bladed tangle of various styles of square wave lusting electronic music, each of which (IDM, industrial, ambient, et al) exerts its influence like a conciliating cancer growing slowly, but surely, within the pandemonium.
Slow, spookier moments, such as the glitchy Bach organdizing of “The Feast,” quasi-theremin ululation on “City on a Hill,” or the ambient reprieve offered to haggard victims of Board Up The House’s first three tracks by “Recursion/I Won’t Come Back Alive” are punctuated, and mercilessly spurred onward, by galloping, evil White Zombie chords and magma blasts of all-out screaming. And the more upfront bits are as, well, upfront as their titles might suggest: the middle section of “Endless Teeth,” a coasting duet between soft, wailing vocals and soothing drum pumps, serves as divider between two supernovas of guitar and keyboard riffs.
As fitting as their chosen band name is, Genghis Tron represent not only a small pocketful of cleverness in a cesspool overcrowded with Goatwhores, but also a (hopefully infectious) inventiveness, as well. They wed the “why am I sitting here dead sober listening to nothing” ultra-minimalism of ambient electronic to the seemingly directionless noise and utterly ridiculous lyricism of most grindcore and death metal bands. In this wedding, the more abrasive elements are softened, and the unbearable bits of “4′33″ wank championed by droves of Boards of Canada emulators see a streamlining which lends Genghis Tron’s music its alien, ear-catching edge.
Definitely a band pushing the edge. Keep an eye on them. They, or others like them, might be knocking down other Great Genre Walls of Music closer to where your ears live.
Damn Mongorians.
“Board Up The House” live
Tags: best of 2008 candidates, board up the house, dead mountain mouth, electronica, genghis tron, genre blending, grindcore
