Twin Stumps deal in drudgery and don’t stop pushing until you’re on the floor with yr skull all caved in and your bones ground into fine, stinky sand. I’m sorry to be so graphic (wait — no I’m not) but Seed Bed is to music what that last issue of AdBusters — with the decapitated limbs, half-eaten elephants, and torn-asunder flesh — was to print. Twin STUMPs, indeed. This racket is the closest I’ve heard to Landed since Landed, yet even heavier, even more disjointed, and socially inept. You might say they do for slow, electric power-grinds what Okie Dokie did for punk: sludge it up and watch as the bodies collect in a scarlet pile.
Just stack post-sludge riffs, busy, principal-component bass-playing, and throat rips on top of a slow-burn beat, and you’re not far off. The drummer — who I will not refer to by his first name; why is cover art always so vague? — is definitely one of the stars here. Like that kid from No Age (who are not at all otherwise related to T Stumps), he piledrives his kickdrum so thoroughly you forget he has anything else on his kit. Then he gets into the snare-hi-hat combos, and it’s like uncle Joe getting into that stash of whiskey and slapping you around. I’m not complaining about the well-appreciated romping he does on his ride cymbal, neither.
Getting into the bangers-’n’-mashing nuts and bolts of the guitar and bass is a little trickier. Remember The Pope (interestingly there’s a track here called “Pope’s Nose,” which is a British phrase for the end piece of a loaf of bread. So, you know, use that.)? Yeah, me too, but there’s more; Mikaela’s Fiend, Shearing Pinx (more in the vox than anything else), Lightning Bolt/Mindflayer (ooh, I just got Mr P’s nuts all whet/wet): any forward-thinking group of punk tinkerers can do the hyper-distorted two-man-band thing, but it’s particularly nice to hear four guys melding together so closely that it sounds like a tandem or maybe a trio. The only criticism I could see myself leveling at this material is that it sticks so closely to its parameters, never ranging far off the grid once a pattern of ass-pounding is established.
In this case, Twin Stumps deal so harshly with their subject that their close-hewed sound is a blessing rather than a curse. Dip into this 11-cut well freely, as there isn’t a single dud in the bunch. LAY down that seed bed, man!
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