Bastard Noise / Endless Blockade
The Red List
20 Buck Spin
It would be the height of foolishness to outright dismiss this split album between Man is the Bastard offshoot Bastard Noise and Toronto’s Endless Blockade as mere noise music. The music on The Red List is far more innovative and, dare I say, catchy than the typical “screamy dude with ten effects pedals” stuff of endless cassette releases. This album was first conceived two years ago, when these two bands had occasion to share stages together – and the intervening time was quite well spent, as each outfit has evolved and refined their sounds far from their scree-and-rend origins.
Bastard Noise’s contributions are almost stunning in their nimble, fleet-footed vileness. Drums and bass are pushed far to the fore, creating a deconstructed-funk/doom hybrid, with mountains of percussion shifting like the desert sands, undercut every step of the way by pathologically evil serpentine vocals and understated spurts of electronic weirdness. Grindcore and post-rock and musique concrete are all pushed into the Bastard Noise puree and the result is nonlinear noise music that is surprisingly listenable and, umm, you’ll find yourself banging your head if you’re not careful. However, Bastard Noise, being stubborn fuckers till the end, even depart from their own new formula with the spine-tingling electronics and spoken (well, screamed) word menace of “U.S.A. Today” – we’re talking Abruptum territory here.
New model Bastard Noise is a goddamn tough act to follow, but the Endless Blockade do their best. They contribute the fourteen-minute original track “Deuteronomy,” a monumental mashup of Khanate and Nausea; fascinating in its simultaneous ambition and disdain thereof. It’s unfair to judge them by the quality of the remixes, as The Rita’s fourteen-minute treatment of “Model 49 Rebreather” is seemingly nothing more than a loop of VERY painful and distorted static, much better is composer Noah Creshevsky’s mangling of “Advanced Directive ,” wherein he goes all William Burroughs and Brion Gysin on the source material, creating a sound collage that is disorienting in its quick cuts and scissor snips of their most brutal moments into a kind of twisted highlight reel which might, possibly, be their most perfect metal song. Or for the more sensitive, a headache.
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