Kylie Minoise and Grimalkin555 — Kill Baby Kill!

Split album, collaboration, or tag-team competition? I had a hard time picking just one of those labels to describe this joint effort, so I’ll cop out and use all of them. I don’t think they’d mind, since there’s elements of all three approaches on this disc, and the end result is diverse and engaging enough that no one of those labels really matters. The cover art (horror/trash movie stills) and leering track titles made me fear this would be yet another grinding slog, but like the Kenji Siratori et al. split disc I looked at the other week I was happy to be proven wrong.

The arrangement of the disc is the first interesting point. Instead of the usual split-album arrangement where you have Artist A upfront and Artist B following them, Kylie Minoise and Grimalkin555 alternate tracks all the way through. Because the disc’s been engineered so that some tracks follow each other more or less seamlessly, that makes it feel more like a collaboration (interesting point #2), and sometimes even a “pick up where I left off!” relay race.

And then there’s the music itself. Both artists love volume for its own sake, but they also like variety. The best showcase for this is track 3—Grimalkin555’s “Zombie Food Court (slomo style)”, where there’s an honest-to-god melody in there somewhere, playing along on a different frequency than the rest of the sludge spewing out of the speakers, and it’s a testament to both the engineering skill and the creativity of the artist that you can follow all that. Kylie Minoise’s best moment was saved for last: “ESP ORGY!” (their caps), a twelve-minute burnout that plays like a slow-motion slide up a corrugated iron roof right into the blue sky.

“Diverse” is the best word to use here. I’m getting pretty fed up with the non-stop, all noise all the time approach to this sort of music; after a while, where do you go from up (or in this case, loud)? Some degree of creativity has to come back into the picture, some subtlety and some fresh ideas, and I hear a little of all of those things on this disc. It isn’t all about sheer overkill, but then again maybe in the hands of the best and brightest in this field, it never was.