Iron Fist Of The Sun — Behavioural Decline
What we have here is not a chaotic wall of noise, but a meaty, fat, synthetic sound. Lee uses what is called 'signal routing' to get a sound that is warm, thick, round and pleasant like the sensation of humming to yourself. This is aesthetically minded noise - It is obviously intended to be an intense and violent experience, but it's obvious too that the creator actually likes listening to these sounds. The attention to textural subtlety and detail lends class and polish to tracks like "The Power of New Septembers". Howard channels the dream imagery and rich, granular hallucinatory textures of Cyclobe and Coil and couples them with heavily drugged emotional detachment and alienation. Lee Howard has mentioned his Coil inspiration in an interview, and indeed these resonant mantras certainly recall the purity and harshness of Coil's singular 2002 noise album "Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil". The semitonal loops and riffs are almost like basslines.
That said, this album is still as sonically harsh as just about any release on the market.
Several tracks on the album, with their simple pulses and screamed vocals, definitely recall Whitehouse as well, such as opener "First Movement of a Shallow Man", except here the music actually IMPROVES with the decipherability and audibility of the vocals, because it's not just the same meat-headed, clumsily written, serial killer's diary fodder. Rather, Lee's simple but poetic phrases perplex with their myriad potential meanings and never resort to explicit or cliched violence or anarchist politics. Just listen to "Smile Like Sword", one of the most memorable and anthemic tracks I've heard this year. His catchy, powerful lyrics and chants make this old sound worth revisiting, and it's not overdone, as tracks in this style actually take up a little less than half of the album.
This album has the authenticity of being created during a real life crisis - a crippling addiction. The apparently quite inebriated Lee Howard bellows in single-minded, detached aggression. The eerie specter of Princess Diana (his strange obsession) leers from the booklet, and from the cover of his more recent album "Blush". This music exists in an emotional dimension only reachable by the obsessive addict. Lee has not been explicit about the circumstances that led to the creation of this album, but it's obvious that, in an emotional sense, this album is deep and complex, and as real as they come.
With tracks like "Didn't Stop Me Trying" Lee lets it all out. 4 minutes of harsh noise. His vocals are still sometimes present, but the sound is much denser and it's harder to tell which sounds could be his voice. "Bluetack" is an absolutely mindbending track that eschews all conventions for a form of beautifully unhinged intuitive improvisation - Lee seems to just let his mind create a structure automatically, and the result is a trip into a truly alienating, strange realm. His ragged voice howls out of the maelstrom, and though the words are indecipherable it feels as if this is because the message is simply nonverbal.
Not content to let "Behavioural Decline" be as a solid noise / power electronics record, Howard adds a surprising finish to the album with the 15 minutes of "Concert for Evening Battle", which shift restlessly as if alive. This is a less violent, more textural Lee Howard (even if some of the high frequency on this track are absolutely PUNISHING), and hints at more experimental music to come. The track goes through several sections, and sounds like at times like a harsher version of the music found on the Raster Noton label.
Conclusion - Lee Howard was born to create power electronics, and "Behavioural Decline" is a marvellously viscious, cathartic disk. He also shows serious potential as a soundscape artist / sound sculptor along the lines of Aube, K.K. Null or his acknowledged inspiration, Coil, and I look forward to hearing more work in this vein from him in the future.