posted 02/04/2009 (Wed) @ 03:19 pm
>>> Music Reviews
Final - Dead Air (2008)
Dark Ambient / Industrial / Electronic
This is your brain on Final.
- Slow Air
- Caved
- Fearless Systems
- Disordered
- Inanimate Air
- Subterrane
- Smeared Air
- Descendre
- Dead Air
If “patience is a virtue,” welcome to the promised land. Listening to Dead Air feels like being stuck in a traffic jam. This hour-long slab of brooding noise is for folks who love the dark and discordant. You need to be half-awake, half-asleep, or half-stoned in a windowless room to get through it in its entirety more than once.
Sometimes it’s difficult to envision the moments in life which call for Dead Air, or albums of its ilk. No, ambient listeners aren’t searching for melody or even convention, so it’s not like you’re going to put this on at the football stadium. What situations, or people, are best served by music that sometimes sounds like a defective refrigerator (”Dead Air”) and other times like a swarm of interstellar cockroaches (”Inanimate Air”)?
The answer is, most probably, zombies. “Slow Air” and its machinist’s wet dream distorto bass are for when they want to rock out, “Disordered” is for those times when they’re in more of a “shuffle around at the mall mumbling ‘brains… brains!’” mood, and “Smeared Air” is the perfect soundtrack to the aforementioned traffic jam. A synth totally devoid of life or vigor drones for infinity, the sole, droning backbone in the piece for splashes of short-circuited musique concrete modem static and at least one (shockingly, for this record) busy bleep-blip “solo” at about 3:50 in.
“Fearless Systems” is perhaps the most straight-lacedly ominous pick of the bunch. This time the synth plays more than one note, and its creepy-crawly ostinato gels perfectly with lurching bass undulations and an incessant chattering noise in the background like that of some kind of mechanical woodpecker. Other unidentifiable sounds “flesh out” the piece… leaving it still a bit lacking in the vitality department. But that seems to be the point.
Final is a.k.a. Justin K. Broadrick, a.k.a. the main man behind noisegazer three-piece Jesu. Which means that if you can’t stomach Jesu, listening to Final will be like gargling battery acid. Loiterers and armchair superheroes might get something out of it. If medical marijuana is involved, there’s a good chance that if you stick with Dead Air long enough, it will put you to sleep before you can turn something more lively back on. And that’s always preferable to having to watch the fucking Superbowl.
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Tags: ambient, dark ambient, electronic, industrial, jesu, noise
3 comments on this article
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obZen Says:
April 6th, 2009 at 3:39 pmWhat an ignorant 1 Dimentional review.
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Luke Rounda Says:
April 6th, 2009 at 4:45 pm@obZen: Part of it might be that I don’t know how to listen and appreciate ambient/noise music. Let me know what you see in the record and maybe I’ll hear something I didn’t. I doubt it, but it’s always possible.
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Rx Says:
April 29th, 2009 at 9:08 amI admire Broadrick for his single-minded dedication to his perceived purpose. Not everything does works for me. I found “Fade Away” to include moments of surprising beauty (give it a try), but some of this machines on heroin music just doesn’t convince. Broadrick produces so much that when he dives into a sucking black hole of despond, it doesn’t hurt to indulge him. He usually returns better for it.
