Matt Bower chooses to use his Sunroof! moniker to release music which is more of a fire breathing trail than an exercise in cosmic liberation.
Instead of Bower's usual fluorescent drone work and mechanistic sound pieces usually recorded under Sunroof!, sheets of high frequency noise and metallic scree dominate this album. These play with an intensity that is unremitting and eventually exhausting. Each component is constantly pushed up the front of the mix and stays there like an obnoxious cousin breathing down your neck. This directness adds a density to the sound, but the impact is blunted by the static arrangement of most the tracks. Bower has a tendency to let his sounds play for minutes without adding or subtracting anything. This approach has worked previously in Sunroof!, but the elements here are too volatile to be left alone.
The grating static and metallic blasts certainly demand attention, but each track rewards 30 seconds of it as much as six minutes. It is only until track three that this kind of searing pressure is removed. Both C. Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core and Mick Flower of Vibracathedral Orchestra are guest players here. It's hard to discern exactly what they are doing, but there is clearly more going on. Metallic loops and scrapes flutter out of clouds of reverb like screams of some sentient junkyard. It is menacing like the rest of the album, but also controlled and approachable. The lo-fi production bunts the harsher frequencies, opening up wider listening perspective, like watching a volcano erupt on a distant island. After that, the rest of the album is a bit of a come down, and music devolves back into undifferentiated harshness.
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