Gleefully jumping between noise, grindcore, power electronics, and just plain bizarreness, Josh Landes’s Limbs Bin is the premier noise artist of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and with releases such as this 7" it is not hard to see why. The components of Blast Anthemics for a New Generation of Ecstatic Youth are pretty standard: feedback electronics, drum machine blast beats, and a healthy helping of yelling. It is the way Landes mixes these together, however, along with an appropriate amount of silliness, which makes this single stand out.
One of the most impressive aspects of Landes’s work is how well he manages to create music that can be as brutal as any other noise artist, but couched in the right amount of absurdity.Side A establishes this perfectly, from the ridiculously bombastic fanfare into a spoken introduction by no other than Wendell "Bunk from The Wire" Pierce as part of a cut up passage.From here he blends in fragments of live performances from 2014 through 2017, mostly a combination of full auto drum machine programming, manic vocals, and painful feedback.
Comparably, the second side is more of a cut and paste type collage.Various performances are interspersed:some straight up traditional noise feedback and broken oscillator tones, others a mass of plodding doom-laden drum machine and aggressive shouting.Intermingled with some truly bizarre sample choices (Ashton Kutcher and what sounds like a random kid’s YouTube narration) and a grindcore pop karaoke performance, the final product is as perplexing as it is brilliant.
What makes this 7" so exceptional is that, for all its aggressive, edgy harshness inspired brutality, there is a goofy sense of fun and absurdity that lingers not far from the surface.In a style and genre that often takes itself far too seriously, Josh Landes instead revels in the absurdity that is inherent in noise and makes the best of it, resulting in a 7" that is actually fun to listen to.Like the work of America's Greatest Living Noise Artist Emil Beaulieau, he revels in the ridiculousness while still making as abrasive of a racket that any po-faced art school graduate or crypto-fascist misogynist could, it is a lot more fun to listen to.
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