“The Face” turns toward you from Civil War’s tracklist, emerging from the ash of unspeakable holocaust, and stares you right in your own face, unblinking, rigid, aggressive. “The Face” is an outlier of sorts — what’s come before it is a mass of creeping dread, throbbing frequencies, serrated gristle, anguished shrieks. Civil War (No Part of It) is a literal civil war on the senses, ears versus mouth, mind versus heart, all boiling blood and bile as it tries to get a foothold on reality through its blind and bludgeoning rage. One look at ringleader Arvo Zylo’s collaborators (which include such noise and extreme music luminaries as Bruce Lamont, Mike Weis, and Wyatt Howland) and you’ll get the picture, the grim, unfiltered, sandblasted picture.
“The Face” is an outlier of sorts — instead of rending a hole in space-time, it stalks, slinks, lurks, and preens into your speakers on a leering synthetic bass loop like Chris Sarandon across a crowded Fright Night club. Zylo bellows angrily, resolute, over the bubbling miasma, and he does so at intervals following ten-horn pileups and shifts into tribal industrialism. Actually, it’s a ten-everything pileup by the end of this thing, but it’s always uncompromisingly stripped bare, proudly flaunting its wires and gears and connections and plugs and metallic fragments, its robot skeleton magnetized till all unmoored objects within range zip toward its pull.
And shoot if my head wasn’t nodding like waddling duck’s.
Civil War is civil war, a blitzkrieg of mechanized sound delivered at high volume and intensity. “The Face” is the 1914 Western Front Christmas truce, except somebody spiked the eggnog with mustard gas.
Also, it’s the only digital track you’re getting from this sucker. Everything else is on one of three shades of vinyl, analog only.
More about: Blood Rhythms
