It has been a full decade since Drumm's last solo album on Mego (2002's massive and career-defining Sheer Hellish Miasma) and quite a bit has changed in the noise world since then.  While more modest in scope this time around (Relief is a 37-minute EP), Kevin's latest effort shows that an impressive evolution has occurred over those ten years, as he hits the perfect balance between his characteristic howling noise and his infrequently surfacing ambient side.  That comes as no surprise to me at all, but I was pleasantly taken aback by the sheer ferocity of Relief's noisy side.  Drumm is clearly not mellowing with age.
This EP has one extremely significant and immediately apparent characteristic that dwarfs all of its others, in that it is apologetically, spectacularly monolithic.  I can randomly skip to any one-second fragment of Relief and it will sound almost exactly the same any other fragment.  In fact, the only significant variance comes at the very end, and even that is pretty minor (the piece slowly fades out).  Otherwise, the piece is essentially a non-stop roar of roiling entropy from the second it starts until the very end.  That one-dimensionality only exists in a large-scale sense though, as Relief is far from dull: while the piece's bleak and floating synth motif remains a relatively static backbone, the underlying noise is apocalyptically explosive and immense.  There is a very good reason why Kevin is widely considered one of the world's greatest active noise artists, as his layers and layers of squalling static and white noise basically sound like the world is collapsing.
Drumm's ear-shredding avalanche sounds extremely clear and crisp and is both crushingly dense and bludgeoningly immediate.  If I had a grievance with this effort (which I do not), it would probably be that the melodic component does not evolve as the piece progresses, or maybe that the piece does not actually progress at all.  Instead, it more or less feels like being thrown into Drumm's scorching cacophony midstream and staying there until he feels like fading out.  However, the sheer enormity, violence, and microcosmic vibrancy of it all easily makes me forget about its compositional shortcomings and the forlorn melody is merely there to act as foil for that face-melting eruption, which it does beautifully.  Not so beautifully that Relief could be mistaken for anything other than a harsh noise album, of course, but the contrast it provides enhances the viciousness of the piece while simultaneously making it pretty listenable (by noise standards, anyway).  In lesser hands, such a sustained, unrelenting eruption would undoubtedly become quite wearisome at some point, but in Drumm's, it is a bracing, virtuosic tour de force.
(one caveat: It is not entirely rational that this is being released on vinyl, given that it is a single piece with no pauses or breaks of any kind.  I like vinyl as much as anyone, but sometimes that medium just does not make sense and this is definitely one of those times.)
 
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