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Proper mad bollocks from sacred fuck-chops! Where are we? Whacked-out, whacked off & whack-luster? No Wave? Abnorm? or hopelessly Avant-asphyxiated nonsense venerating derailment? I think it’s a four piece? Chick on vocals, a drummer with masses of percussion, guitar & often bass (optimized by a sprawling miscellany of FX pedals & modulators) & of course an assailant on Noise (or what you will). The “Noise” protagonist first then – pedals galore, cassette & reel work, samples & looping & quite feasibly some lap-top, synthesizer or/& Chaos Pad debauchery. It’s a massive motley mess of shift, shed, interchange & modal misshaping that resists settling in any singular Noise definition or approach (as in Harsh Noise, Circuit Bending, Drone etc). Really, to refer to it as “diverse” would probably fumble yards from the drop-zone – it is terrifically capacious, straying & splaying all over the place. The vocalist – she spills cryptic & elliptic lunacy, great lyrics that denote no reason & stew in thorough poppycock, but also blatantly fluoresce with sapience & a very well-manicured imagination that’s a wee bit outta’ control. Most of the vocals are ultra-clean (no distortion) on this recording & on some occasions can seem a little un-impressionable or conflicting with the surrounding madness. Mostly though, they work wonders & at particular junctions (such as Hand Of God, which endorses some kind of puke n’ perform/retch a word brilliance) turn out the aces at maximum strength. Drums – I have rarely heard such a confused, lolling fucking-freak of a drum style. It might be best to describe it as directionless, almost formless…totally unsure of it’s own appendages… involuntary like Tourette’s Syndrome, just suddenly doing “this or that” for reasons that are not present. Sometimes, something vaguely coherent will jump in for a brisk cameo, otherwise it’s erratic & aimless. That’s not a negative critique, the drumming/flexile percussive varieties here are super & totally integral to this beyond-bat-shit junk, somewhere between freedom, specific task & brain-damage. The equipment is also a museum piece in itself, bells/blocks/gongs & probably stuff plucked from skips/fished out of canals etc. t-t-t-t-the strings? Bass & guitar – distortion addled, FX duress, jumped-up, jactitating? In-sync with the closest possible reference to “modus operandi” as we will get with Fat Worm Of Error, they rarely produce anything formal/riff based.
How’s all that sounding? Amalgamate unequally, stick the lot in a baking tray & deposit in a nuclear reactor core. The results are spectacular. The earlier tracks on side A can be a bit uh, – random! But later the LP seems to develop with what I think is a code of genius loitering behind the seemingly inapproachable Splodgecore/What The Fuckery! There’s a lot going on here, tremendous ingenuity, super innovations & supra singularity. I am not sure how the band write/construct songs? I suspect that most here have a loose sketch/grape -based-exoskeleton that births these awesome results. I would also hazard to say that the band is closer to free-form than script in general (at least on this recording), but I may well be horrifically mistaken?! It definitely is not just “Noise” although many with their third eye dormant or undeveloped will deem it so. There’s a very interesting argument as to if this shit is more noisecore than “Noisecore”! FWOE utilize a cargo-hold more textures & themes & go more for oddness, eccentricity & hyper weirdness. Noisecore is a genre where 98% of the bands lack any kind of imagination or personality & conform to certain orthodoxies for all impact (i.e. blast beats & common distortion). The two Noisecore/Gunk outfits that bare any strain of similarity to FWOE would be early Jet Jaguar KR3 Kill Spree (there is one single track with heavy computerization on this LP called “Petulant Bureaucrats Pummeled with Peanut Butter” that really reminds me of JJKR3). The second is of course absurdist Osaka Gunk royalty Himitsu King. Himitsu King were far more apparent/orientated with their Noisecore, Grindcore & Fastcore/Hardcore & Prog influences as well as being much less on the freeform directory & more enthused to tight structured songs (laden with heaps of other off shit). Of course, & wonderfully, these bands are all goose-bump inducingly original & self-determined, but a common thread of distinctive absurdity is shared.
Whatever waivers, this is ridiculously thrilling stuff from a very’ very special collective. The album is a complete triumph.
Rekd-2006
Label-Load Records