posted 11/24/2008 (Mon) @ 09:41 pm
>>> Music Reviews
Transistor Transistor - Ruined Lives (2008)
Screamo / Rock / Hardcore / Noise
Can’t Resistor
- Morning Sickness
- The Price of Gasoline
- Brass Bones
- Diet of Worms
- Pillar of Salt
- The Ghost Hand
- Harvest
- Letter of Resignation
- Celluloid Rats
- Irreversible
- Teratogen
Hardly anything says “We’re out here in the woods because this where our fans live! We play as loud as we want! (That is as loud as possible!) If you don’t like it, piss off and go home!” better or more succinctly than Ruined Lives’s album art: a lonely but ferocious full stack stranded in a snowy forest. Heck-a-doodle, neighboroonie, it took me this whole paragraph to say it with words.
Stephen Colbert might not approve of them palling around out there with the grizzly animals on his Threat Down! list, but the woodsy connotation truly fits this band. They’re clearly meat-eaters, or at the very least, their music probably grinds up bones in place of toothpaste. At the same time, Ruined Lives’s splatterpunk sonics at times sound like a desperate escape attempt: the sounds in a hermit’s brain as he fishtails into madness inside his cabin’s four walls.
“My apathy and I get along just fine,” they drone on the “The Ghost Hand,” a brief timeout from the assaultive, yet catchy riffage of the record thus far. The tune’s honey-drip pace, seasick blues slide work, plinks of haunting piano, and Slint by way of the Pixies vocal treatment set it a world apart from the rest of Ruined Lives, and most screamo bands in general. Of course, with former members of Orchid and Wolves rounding out TT’s lineup, it’s no surprise that these punks can’t spell “nihilism” without “artsy.”
Opener “Morning Sickness” hits like a rusty iron pipe to the back of the head. Imagine Thursday or other hardcore screamers, but with a more tolerable vocalist. “Morning Sickness” subsides into a few spare, pristine pricks of solo guitar toward the end, before slamming on the gas again for an eyes-popping-from-skull metallic breakdown. “Diet of Worms” plays like a slightly more upbeat Refused outtake from The Shape of Punk to Come. Drony “Harvest”? Perhaps an orphaned child of Jesu, aurally punching My Bloody Valentine in the face.
All well and good. Infinitely more listenable than a lot of screamo records—mostly ones where the lead screamadeer can’t shut the fuck up for more than two seconds—and packed full of twists and turns, dynamic shifts, staccato mosh fuel, and cynical, spoken word elegy, Ruined Lives is a prime example of how to make a screamo record great. Of course, nothing here exactly stands out as new, exactly—just extremely well done.
Is that a bad thing? If you demand “originality” from everything, yes. If you just want a fucking top notch forty minutes of headbang, hell no.
Links
Download [My Endless Minutes] (support the band, buy it if you like it)
Myspace
Tags: metal, orchid, post-hardcore, punk, rock, ruined lives, screamo, transistor transistor
