Kanin Krusete — Like A Thing

Up and coming noisician Kanin Krusete alternately bangs out short, simple stoner rock tunes and 5 minute chunks of harsh noise.   "Like A Thing" is my first exposure to Kanin, and contains some of the harshest sound I've heard all year, possibly ever.  The almost laughably fuzzed out, crunchy sound of the guitar is immediately satisfying, though it's hard to know what to do with it...  You can't blast this album (it will KILL your hearing), jam out to this album, reach a cathartic inner space with this album, analyze its structures or intentions...  Kanin's compositional abilities leave something to be desired, his playing lacks any real direction or finesse.  He tries to play riffs in about two thirds of the music, and they are uninspired, cliched and simple chord progressions hardly updated from the era when Black Sabbath played them in the 70's.  Listening to the album, one gets the sense that Kanin feels the massive distorted tone of the guitar makes  up for these riff related shortcomings, but this is only occasionally the case.

"Love Like A Demonic Smile" is likely the single loudest track I have ever heard.  The sheer physical pain caused by the opening seconds is impressive.  Kanin beats his feedbacking guitar like a percussion instrument.  The angular dissonances of the harsh, metallic feedback combined with the title have a truly demonic effect.  A crunching stoner metal riff enters and chugs nicely, coming off as a lot more badass than it likely would've without the terrifying intro.  Little shrieks of feedback creeps back into the bassy distortion, and there's a doomy Electric Wizard-esque breakdown.  It ends after 2:40, and doesn't overstay its welcome.  I couldn't handle much more of this.

"Veteran Plates", which follows, is some nice crackling, brooding HNW.  Most of the piece is constant but in a couple instances in the middle of the track we get indecipherable, bitter mutterings from Kanin.  It's not as tense as the previous track.  Once the listener gets used to the initial volume of the piece, there's nothing jarring to keep you on edge here.  This wall has a satisfying thickness, and nice crunchy midrange.

I thoroughly enjoy those first 2 tracks, but the rest of the album, well...  a lot of it feels like 'playing around', and not in a good way.  It's as if Kanin himself does not care what is on the album and what is not.  "Fckn Hate Song" comes and goes.  It's mostly a lot of forgettable doom metal inspired guitar noodling...  I feel just about anyone could play like this.  There are some quality sounds but I feel it has about as much intensity and power as the bored sounding voice that intones "Ok.  Ok...  alright" during the two minutes of sound check that is for some reason included before this track.  The rich hum of the amps during this section is nice, but Kanin just lets it dissipate before starting the track proper, and attempts no kind of cohesion within the track that maybe could've lent it some energy.  At the end of the track the same bored voice says "...click."

Samples that add nothing muddy up some of the nicest bits of noise.  Minimal progressions that should be mesmerizing are into shoved to the left channel and mixed with a sample of what seems to be the everyday gossip of high schoolers ("1987 Buick GNX 'Over My Dead Body' [Chop and Screw Like the Noise Doers Do]" ... even the title suggests he is merely 'testing the waters' of the noise genre).  Here the tone of the guitar feels bland and weak.  I would guess this was an older piece Kanin decided to include on the record for lack of another home.  Like the previous track, it lacks intensity and should have been omitted completely.

"Dedicated To All The Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist Bullshit" features the fuzziest, most absurdly mulched up distorted guitar yet.  It serves as a pleasant drone interlude (2 minutes long) that feels more thoughtful and well paced than the previous two tracks.  The recording quality even seems to be better.  Again, pointless samples of relatively emotionless dialogue (they sound directly recorded off of the radio or TV) rear their ugly heads, but they aren't loud enough here to become too annoying.

10 minute closer "I'm Sick Of You" begins as a showcase of Kanin Krusete's strengths - overloaded, bassy guitar drones washing an intro that sound like it could be a sped up sample of a muted thrash riff.  Instead of arranging them into cliched chord progressions, here he lets the rich, resonant sounds drone on.  They are intensely powerful in their purity.  About halfway through the track, the sound devolves into by the numbers harsh noise for lack of other way of building momentum.  It's not annoying, but it's easy forget to pay attention when this part is playing.  A good track that doesn't totally grab me, or take advantage of its length.

Noise has the power to reach a deep and nonverbal place...  Kanin proves that he has the potential to reach this place with a few tracks, but just doesn't seem to care enough to make a consistent piece of work.  In the end, the album is hardly as enigmatic as the fascinating artwork.  I know that not giving a fuck is part of the aesthetic of this sort of thing, but I think the way this album was conceived was lazy, overall.  It has no continuity as a whole; surprising, since continuity is really not too hard to achieve in the noise genre.  "Like A Thing" is just a collection of songs, and a short one at that; less than the sum of its parts.  Of the six tracks, two are dull and forgettable, two are adequate, and two show some real promise.  His noise textures are often delicious, and so I do hope the future will bring a more focused, riff-less album of pure noise from Kanin Krusete, but I doubt I'll often pull out "Like A Thing" , except maybe to show
 somebody how ungodly loud "Love Like A Demonic Smile" is