Music this exciting makes written reflection seem superfluous at best. On the one hand, this Sharps container of volatile materials defies erudition. On the other, it is the classic hyperbole magnet. Out of context, likely Container review words could easily be Container song titles:
red · clamp · gnash · hiss · piston · grind
surge · strap · thud · treble · needle · gored
windburn · flex · punish · dizzy · gnash · skree
Music this immediate makes you question the value of language. You see words and start trying to find edges, tones, aerodynamics over their proper place in a sentence. You want everything to be as boundless as what you’re hearing. Consequently, my listen-while-you-review practice wasn’t gonna fly here. But even on recalling these sounds, one’s expository train is easily derailed.
Instructions for LP (2015):
Set down that guitar. Get that blank look on your face. Press enter. Dance like people are watching, but you’d much rather they stop gawping and join in. Dance like an automatic sprinkler. Trip on your self. Brace for impact. Hear voices, shout down their burden of proof and have a good, godless shudder. Bear down, squint at the cutting glare and find your way to a good pov. Perched on the horizon is a bitch god sun. A sun that hates you, that burns and irradiates and sustains you. Time-lapse photography is embarrassing, with its flipbook resonance. Be freed in your fleeting significance. In your genuine interaction. Be freed of the clandestine arrangements of context. Designated to drive on. Desperate but relieved by creature comfort. Glancing blows, wincing sorrows. Exponential anti-momentum. Dying or dead. Be freed or be fugged.
On first listen (headphones, full volume), this album instantaneously caused this reviewer to flail about madly all by himself in the middle of the woods in a fire tower. It reminded him that he was a lucky man: to have ears, to have working appendages, to exist at all.
There are no chase sequences quite so VG boundless and obstacle mulching in any movie. Fury Road would be close, if it weren’t so damn balmy. This is icy, biting condensation on steel, concrete, and glass. It is the careworn, tar-oozing generator chugging to life amidst the ruin of an endless winter. It is what will save your life when all emotions cannibalize each other out of their usefulness. It is exuberant numbness amidst the tireless mechanisms of uncertain purpose. It’s music we can call uplifting, even though it calls to mind feelings that would most likely be occurring if the San Andreas Fault actually opened up (and The Rock wasn’t there to pluck us to safety). It is alive and invigorating and uncomplicated. It is among that special strain of aggro house music that makes you feel like you could flipkick a parking meter and decapitate it, run and leap through a plate glass window, shoulder-check a city bus onto its side. It is music of strength and empowerment, and the best livewire cacophony bender this reviewer’s encountered since “Little Black Rocks In The Sun.” As one YouTube commenter pointed out, Container’s is one of the few Boiler Room shows where you will actually see the audience moving around.
As essential as Demdike Stare’s similarly blown out recent Testpressing material has been, Container has them beat for fleetness. As last year’s attention-grabbing Adhesive EP intimated, the new Container is a richly rhythmic powerhouse of gleeful propulsion. The beats trump everything, including the tones that are so overdriven they might as well be more beats. Music this shrill and impactful (as with fellow in-the-red Rhodies, Lightning Bolt) weeds out the tentative right quick. You’re either lurching into formation or running for the night air. Since Container’s tracks never fade in, coming late to a set must be like descending the redlighted steps in the lust section of Se7en, the dread and anticipation running neck and neck.
Det. Somerset: “Can we do something about this music!?”
Officer at scene: “Man, we’re workin on it. We’re lookin’ for the guy.”
I never thought about how absurd the notion is of not being able to turn the music off at a crime scene, but it’s a lovely idea just the same. I like to imagine the “guy” is Ren Schofield and that nobody was able to find him. Even after cutting the power to the building, the thudding sonic onslaught never lets up. There are places in the world where the intensity, motion, and general turmoil never subsides. The largest cities, the sun, an anthill, our internal bodily functions… Container is the music of robust, unexistentially encumbered industry. It belies the inherent virtue of blind persistence in a reality of competing influence and distraction that could easily knock the wind out of us at any second. It is boorish, yet graceful and nimble enough to make you wanna find moves that flash at spazzy but stop short at an awkward, diagonally-patterned centrifugal wobble.
LP (2015) is a short and sweet affirmation for the faithful. It’s a bit stabby, but in no way averse to our affections. It brusquely yanks us into a blind freefall of a dance, making with a little gouged bump and pig factory grind as we plummet. And I really don’t see nothin’ wrong with it, no.