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Jennifer Kelly, DUSTED:
If you’re going to compare the sheaves to the Fall, fair enough, but let’s be clear. The reference point is not the hooky, keyboard-lighted Fall of the Brix years, they of “C.R.E.E.P.” and “Cruiser’s Creek.” No, this is more like the late dystopic Fall, the slurry, spitty years following Country on the Click, where Mark E. Smith drawled madly on over disintegrating textures of rock-adjacent guitar noise. Like end-stage Fall, the sheaves are always falling apart, always dissolving into chemicals, always losing the thread. Listening to Excess Death Cult Time is like trying to make sense of a dream you’re having, not later, but while it’s still going on.
The title track, for instance, starts with a bass haring off in an indeterminant direction, and someone coughing. Soon, two more guitars are at it, noodling high and not in any recognizable key, at odds with one another, but possibly making the convergent points. (Imagine a bar fight where two drunks are yelling at each other at increasing volume but, weirdly, yelling the same thing.) The drums very nearly hold things together, or at least keep them in the same room, but chaos roils underneath, always ready to spew up out of the murk. And over all this, the singer, drones disconsolately, his voice discernible mostly as a buzz but occasionally taking shape in words, i.e., “Are you losing your hair, it’s passing you by, it’s passing you by, it’s a lovely excess death cult time.” The song is a mess of sharp-edged parts clanking together.
This is a band not afraid to try out a song called “Guitar Wank,” which, true to its name, gives a pair of players license to do whatever the fuck, in concert and conflict with a high noodling keyboard, also wandering untethered. The song coalesces out of parts, taking shape from dream-like voices, doubled, but slightly out of sync, and a snaggle of intertwined dissonance. Imagine staring at tangled piles of junkyard wires until you can see the shapes of animals in them (and then staring longer, until these shapes disappear). This is what listening to “Guitar Wank” is like.
Not that it’s unpleasant, especially if you’ve been weaned on folk-noise-industrial eccentrics like Siltbreeze’s Pink Reason and CIA Debutant. If it were easier to get to the songs, you might not bother. Everybody loves a challenge. And so, perhaps, it’s worth mentioning that two songs on this disc come together right away, not exactly welcoming you in, but at least opening the door.
“Hit Silly” is the real ringer here, with its rumbling shimmy of electric guitars and half swallowed vocals giving it a cracking, staticky sheen like early Guided by Voices. It’s considerable signal cuts through the noise. Indeed, it’s anthemic the way the guitar chords shift in inevitable ways. There’s a clear progression and none of the antic scrabbling in corners, the mumbled venom, the chaos.
“Lariat Slung” makes it a party, too, with its thundery bass and antic carnival keyboards. The singer elides and swallows the words, muttering ominously most of the time then breaking into startling clarity. “Oh there’s nothing to do, all of the time, oh say, I feel sick, all of the time.” You might feel a little woozy yourself by this point, but in a good kind of way.