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Band: Necroanal & Children in Gas Masks Album: Divedere Album Year: ?? Label: Smell The Stench Genre(s): Power Electronics, Power Noise, Noise, Ambient Band Website: myspace.com/xnecroanalx || myspace.com/cigm9999
Rating: 5.5/10 Tracks
1-11 = Children in Gas Masks
Necroanal and Children in Gas Masks don’t fuck around and give us a full length split album entitled Divedere.
Children in Gas Masks open up the disc with the first 11 tracks. I have never heard anything from them previously, but their work on this disc is ambient power electronics. Their tracks are mostly comprised of slow, plodding thickly distorted drones. They give the feeling of a slow, somewhat placid descent into death or some sort of dark nether realm of being. The tracks create and maintain a dark and barren soundscape that quickly envelopes the listener and thrusts them headfirst into the process of their own inevitable demise. The songs are relatively the same, and they can get a bit tedious to a passing listener, but honestly I found that I could not bring myself to switch the track. There is something incredibly hypnotic and tranquil about this work. I personally have never heard power electronics done in a way like this before. The textures are plainly overly distorted, however they are never in your face or unpleasant and the experience is. Unfortunately, by track 7 CIGM decides end the pleasant meditative journey, and gives up completely pointless over the top noise. The rest of their tracks are extremely loud and abhorrent noise tracks that seem to attempt to be as painful as possible. These tracks really killed my initial enjoyment of this album.
Necroanal is up next beginning at track 12. Initially he decides to follow suit and plays the power electronics card with his first track. This track is loud and abrasive. But then he goes back to his trademark style of grind-y power noise. He introduces us to a beat (finally) in track 13. Necroanals tracks are a bit longer on this album than on the other things I have heard from him and I think this does more damage than good. The songs have little to no structure, which is ok if the track is only a minute or two, but when the tracks are 4 and 5 minutes long then it loses my interest.. For the most part the songs are well, Necroanal. Very hard, fast, random and intense with lots of force and inertia. Imagine Winterkalte’s Disturbance at double or triple speed. Sometimes it works really well and sometimes it feels over the top and ridiculous, but if nothing else it is definitely an experience. My gripe is that there is a bit too much noise and not enough of a beat to carry it.
The bottom line is that some portions of this album are very enjoyable and some are really…not. I loved the ambient Children in Gas Mask tracks and some of the Necroanal tracks are worth listening to. Unfortunately there are too many parts of this album that are too abrasive and not worth listening to. I feel like Necroanals tracks this time around are a bit too random and rely too much on “man look how fucking insane this is”. Oh well.
-[.d4n b4rr3tt.] june 2007 |
