Geisha
Mondo Dell’Orrore
Crucial Blast
Totally fuzzed out and overloading, yet somehow still diamond-hard and compact – Geisha’s Mondo Dell’Orrore is discipline-and-punish, self-abusive metalloid noise of a fine vintage. Effortlessly stringing together monstrous rock riffs and soaring vistas of string-bending anxiety and ringing tension, Geisha create something more akin to a mix-tape of fucking high-class post-apocalypse rock. Songs are short and impatient, no room for filler or even a stray breath of air; the performances are tight like good fucking jazz, the headbang quotient is just off the meter, and they do the loud-quiet dynamics without any discernible debt to the Pixies at all (instead think more of Shellac/Neu/Mogwai). Imagine the entire recorded ouvres of Helmet, Unsane and the forgotten Crescent all compressed down into one smoldering brick of sound, then pumped through a wall of decaying Marshall amps, and you’re about halfway there. Unforgiving and unfamiliar.
Geisha is the real fucking deal; the heaviness is vicious thrashing fun, the quieter moments are pure shimmering bliss. Every chord is playing just a little louder and a little faster than what you’re used to. (If grunge hadn’t happened this is what all “alternative” music would have sounded like by 1996.) Oh and I REALLY dig how the album credits list every member as a doctor. Scientist metal? About time.
Crucial Blast Records: http://www.crucialblast.net
