I used to catch a ride home from high school with this kid Trevor. Trevor was heavily into metal. He wore a t-shirt everyday that had cracked and faded images on the front courtesy of repeated washes, and usually a tour schedule on the back in some indecipherable font. Trevor drove a Nova. He had a CD adaptor in his tape deck. He would always play the most irritating metal and insisted on talking to me above it -- about his girlfriend who went to another school, about gym class, about his older brother's good sexual fortune. With every turn, every down-shift, and every bump in the road on the way to dropping me off, the CD player would skip. Trevor never seemed to care -- he would just continue on talking: "And then my brother watched porn with her in my parents' bedroom." The sound of those metal CDs skipping is what Metalycée's debut album closest resembles.
With a quick skim of the tracklisting, it appears we have yet another band that doesn't believe much in space bars or proper punctuation, but in the tradition of Autechre, John Frusciante, and Aphex Twin, favors numbers over words. To me, it's never a good sign when you can't pronounce the song titles. My intuition was correct as the first track came and went -- seven full minutes of ethereal sound concluding in a few seconds of incoming drums. Armin Steiner and Nik Hummer, of thilges3 notoriety, make their mission statement rather clear. It goes something like this: buy electronic-based equipment, cut up whatever metal that is played on instruments, introduce the live samples to the equipment, and wallah! -- a new sub-genre. Sounds dazzling in all its metal shimmer, don't it?
Songs ranging from sparse atmospheric electronics to angular snapshots of riffage and sputtering, near-coherent drum chops make up the majority of the album. Basically, it's a novelty. Blending hip-hop-style sampling, electronica, and metal together hasn't been what you would call a natural progression. You can't force things like that without pretention beating you over the face. These things take time -- time to evolve and time to realize it's not a good idea. Metalycée apparently didn't get the memo.
1. Swing Low
2. Slaughterdijk
3. 21h39
4. Coprario
5. Lostincastings
6. Pianobar
7. Fingerfood
8. 5h17
9. Slaughtered
10. Ironmade 1. Swing Low
2. Slaughterdijk
3. 21h39
4. Coprario
5. Lostincastings
6. Pianobar
7. Fingerfood
8. 5h17
9. Slaughtered
10. Ironmade