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Metal is like a drug – repeated consumption leads to higher tolerance. Fast becomes slow, and strong becomes weak. Virtually all of what’s called “extreme metal” now is hardly extreme. Behind the yelling/growling/shrieking and blastbeats, calcified templates are at work. Extremity by numbers is oxymoronic. It’s ironic that so much metal is unchallenging.
Thus, it’s refreshing to encounter a band like Noism, who surely incite love/hate reactions. Even calling them a “band” is a stretch, since they’re just a guitarist and a programmer. (Says the guitarist in this interview: “All I believe in is sheer brutality, brutality is the ultimate goal in music…”) This is very much programmer’s music – insanely chopped up breakcore with technical death metal skronk on top. It’s like Venetian Snares remixing Portal (the Australian band, not the Cynic side project). Normally, I can’t stand breakcore, but the guitars keep this from becoming pure machine musik. Not that machine musik is bad – see the techno label Tresor – but it’s uninteresting at heart attack speeds; it becomes white noise.
At times,
Cosmo, have your ears gone numb? This is terrible. I’d sooner listen to Opeth, and that admission does not come easily.
File this in the “more interesting conceptually than executionally and not even that interesting conceptually” category. Keep in mind, I rather dislike Origin ‘cuz I think they sound too mechanical, so I was bound to hate this before I hit the lil’ triangle button.
I don’t even hear “sheer brutality” in this record unless brutality is defined as a lack of desire for engagement with one’s audience. Just sounds like Mick Barr playing a duet with a jackhammer to me.
I’m not sure where organized sound can go past here.
Hehe I can understand that point of view but as far as extremity goes, I think a harsh juxtaposition makes something way more extreme than this single-minded jackhammer thing. I mean, a song overlaying children singing nursery rhymes with the sounds of rape would be more extreme than all of ‘extreme metal’ or a song utilizing bricks of white noise segmented irregularly by absolute silence, you get the idea.
Brutality is a ‘metalhead’ thing, and it’s not so much as far as I can tell about actual extremity but about a ‘cool’ approximation of ‘dude that’s like, totally over the top!’. It’s a masculine, rowdy sort of mating dance, it’s not really extreme emotionally (And then the Velvet Caccoon type of black metal is very feminine and regulated but that’s a different story…) Most metalheads can listen to a Cannibal Corpse record while they’re going to sleep and if you played Cannibal Corpse to my grandfather 70 years ago he’d go insane. But *nobody* goes to sleep listening to a nice record by Whitehouse, if you get my meaning.
Yes, my ears have gone numb…with pleasure.
I kind of dig this. This is the sort of thing I would put on repeat for hours and then start to feel depressed and not understand why.
Huh, my EXTRE3M-0-M3TER must be turned down way too low, because my first response to this is, “Agoraphobic Nosebleed is way harsher than this!” I mean, that Merzbow remix on the remix album bundled with PCP Torpedo is some harsh listening, but this isn’t even as harsh as Richard Devine, much less Discordance Axis or asterisk* or Drumcorps. The Drumcorps is kinda more fun, but I attribute that to the presence of sampled vocals (and the always-fun game of “spot the sample”).
Still, I dig this and knew I needed it as soon as I read the review. Thanks as always, Cosmo!
etan – The lack of desire for engagement with one’s audience could be productive. Metal is often predicated on common agreements between performer and audience, so it’s often unchallenging. It’s interesting – though often unenjoyable – when a performer steps up and gives the audience the finger.
Also, I hear much more/less than a jackhammer here. The bpm are high, but there’s a lot of delicacy in the edits.
forrest – the Discordance Axis comparison is interesting, b/c I actually thought of that when I was writing this. Noism seem to be an aural representation of the epileptic, mechanized mayhem that DA portrayed in their lyrics and visuals – but not their audio, which to me seemed like grindcore with weird chords. On the other hand, Jon Chang’s voice is harsher than this sleek beast, so perhaps it’s more “extreme” that way.
Drumcorps doesn’t hit the level of editing detail Noism reaches here. The former seems more like a splatter gun, while the latter seems more, like, I dunno, a shower of darts.
Yeah, but as with Orthrelm and the other bands of that ilk, some of the harshness is diminished because it’s all so consistently twitchy. Drumcorps has more dynamics (and yeah, it’s sort of like it’s a tracker MOD of post-hardcore / grindcore’s greatest hits with some Kid 606 breaks slapped over the top). Noism at root sounds like free noise or free jazz to me. Which maps to Discordance Axis — it seems like both units are trying to maximize the twitchiness and minimize recognizable patterns in an effort to engender estrangement, and both are constrained by the fairly limited sonic palette they’re using.
But they’re also both a kick in the pants.
I’m digging it. Also, after looking a little deeper into the album information I’m glad to see they wisely kept the running time to around 20 minutes.