Black Petal (Tokyo)
#31 la grieta 'decision' (out now)
"dense, dark, claustrophobic, repetitive and the smell of shit / as if you were inside King Kong`s rectum / but then you wake up, and it's actually your life / and the stereo is playing quite a confused mix of music: Dead C meets Sturm meets ESG meets Swans meets Pink Reason meets Merzbow / sounds too good to be true? / well find out for yourself "
The ever so odd La Grieta, a duo of Mattin and Inigo Eguillor, return with a five piece CDR. A duo of drum and guitar and electronics, bits of vocal. Here Black Petal draws lines between them and Dead C, ESG, Swans, Pink Reason and Merzbow. Its not all that I hear in here, but surely Dead C and Swans, I think I can life with those lines. The slow 'Obsesion' with rolling percussion and a far away voice is Swans like, though not as heavy. This guitar/drum noise duo record in a garage and in the studio. It would be interesting to hook them up in a real studio one day and get a great production/mix from the various instruments, and move away from the somewhat 'muddy', lo-fi music it is now. Which is not to say anything bad about this release. It has a great raw power that somehow is also part of this kind of music. Three of the five tracks may be a bit long, but it has a strange psychedelic sense to it. Their use of electronics is what sets them apart from the average rock noise group, strangely cutting into the sounds, usually the vocals, which add an odd, alien feeling to the music. Excellent slow dirty mayhem. (FdW)
Volcanic Tongue (Glasgow)
by David Keenan
Excellent cranked-up guitar/drums no wave brutality from La Grieta,
Mattin’s post-Josetxo Grieta project, all cut to ribbons by his
massively confusing production style. Aspects of 39 Clocks, Mars and
Daily Dance are chopped and screwed into brutalist forms... if you were
confused by the last Billy Bao album you might wanna check in here:
"dense, dark, claustrophobic, repetitive and the smell of shit / as if
you were inside King Kong`s rectum / but then you wake up, and it's
actually your life / and the stereo is playing quite a confused mix of
music: Dead C meets Sturm meets ESG meets Swans meets Pink Reason meets
Merzbow / sounds too good to be true? / well find out for yourself .” –
BP. Recommended.
Quite frankly this is one of the creepiest discs I've heard - La Grieta features Mattin. It starts off with disjointed screams and buzzsaw guitar, like garage punk spliced into nightmare-sized chunks and re-arranged cut-up style. It then heads abyss-wards with creepy-crawly lurching bass and tortured vocals.