Weak Sisters — Opposite / Day
Side A starts off with a short track - Furnace Gates - of high end hissing and growling. The next one - That Drain - has more of a 'melody' to it; a kind of lumbering, melancholic lament from the underground machines of woe, with added vocals which spurt in and out, though these have been so washed out as to be almost indecipherable from the rest of the noise. More vocal shouts on the next very short track - The Ants Form a Ship to Sail the Flood - where, again, a similar 'tune' of machine screeches and vocal wails continues. Next - The Slut - has a bit more variety, with some low-end grunge from the hurricane-cauldron, interweaving with the usual high-end static attack, and it all gets quite chaotic towards the end. The last track - Jaini - is quite interesting, with screaming vocal abstracts and some room for a few different textures of noise amongst the keys-scratching-the-bonnet irritations.
Side B begins with more ants - The Girl Emerges Through the Fire Ants - with more high-end frequency noise, which is cut into with a kind of machine-like factory screech motif. This basically repeats itself, keeping to a Harsh Noise plateau of treble-focused, headache-inducing scrunch. The next track - Eye Cut Into Eyes and More Eyes - is a bit more vital, with more assorted noises, and segues into a kind of ambient noise drone-feedback loop of wire-wool sound-clouds, with the odd stab of punishing high frequency feedback. This eventually splutters into similar, shorter tracks of high-end noise/static/feedback/drone.
All in all, a reasonably interesting release, but nothing to write home about, and occasionally repetitive (in a bad way) and mundane. As with some Harsh Noise releases, it can be an acquired taste, and unless you are already a Harsh Noise Head, you will need to acclimatise yourself to the peculiar logic of what most 'normal' people would run away from, screaming 'aaarrrrgggghhhh!' However, probably like most readers of this website, I don't consider myself 'normal' (read 'boring', 'narrow minded' and 'mind-slave to the bullshit consumerist/commercial status-quo system') I am a lot more open-minded than that, and think there are some incredible noise acts of various descriptions out there, but I have to say that, with releases like this, I just wonder how much actual thought or 'composition' (even if the whole thing is meant to be, in the main, improvisatory) goes into such noise mechanics. I mean, how easy is it to just get a load of drones running on your laptop, or synthesiser, or whatever, and then let the feedback loops of static and other samples or modulated sounds, do the rest?
Sometimes I want something a bit more 'out there' or genuinely experimental, or even containing some craftsmanship or talent (*shudder*) Unless it's taken to a Supreme Black Hole of Extreme Noise, just rambling, repetitive noise isn't always enough! And in that sense, I think this release is for Harsh Noise fanatics and aficionados only.