This is an album full of cheeps, chirps, skronks, bleeps, bloops, beeps, boops, and blarps. Noisy noise rock, with a lot of analog instruments making digital noises, and digital instruments simulating sounds in nature. If nature was made out of machines.
Osso make very tactile music. Imagine solid state transistors being alternately over-amped, then under-watt’d until they hum in key, like changing the pitch of a vibrating coiled spring by stretching and contracting it. Roland 808’s and MiniMoogs are being fed into industrial machinery, which are doing the work of machines; which is to grind, hammer, drill, and press.
Then, pile on layer upon layer of burly, bulldozer bass, and tribal, jazzy drums; whose constantly permuting rhythms shuffle and shamble along. Thread angular guitar textures through it for added color.
Now, neglect to tell the vocalist that we’re cutting the record this evening. Instead set up an old tv in the background, which is tuned between two UHF channels; one is showing a nature documentary about whales making sweet, sweet love, and the other is showing an old episode of the PTL Club, and Tammy Faye Baker is going on about Satanists setting up baby farms so that to meet the constant demand for children to sacrifice.
The production is very immediate; loud and confrontational, instruments clipping and woofer cones tearing under the pressure of all of the air moving from them. I imagined some sort of cartoon machine with pressure gauges being pushed into the red, finally to explode with springs, sprockets, and gears flying all over the place.
Since this is a review, not to mention a review on a metal website; I guess I should give you mopes some sort of “genre relevant stylistic check-points” so you can decide if this would be something you’d even be into. Think Zeni Geva, early today is the day, Painkiller, Big Black, Scorn, Unsane, Candiria, first album Swans, Throbbing Gristle, noisy hip hop, or Napalm Death in their experimental/alternative phase. If any of those things are your jams, this is worth a couple of spins.
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