Dredged loops, more tightly wound than usual. Sightings' releases have a general air of claustrophobia to them, but that's usually from the recorded ambience, not the closed-circuit RAGE overload in the material. Maybe you'd expect a high level of rage content in most noisy post-music these days, but I've detected a more resigned/becalmed air recently, one that this album certainly has its share of, but tempered with an immediacy born of negation. Noise as a genre certainly points towards a distrust of machinery, of precision in general. Sightings do an about-face on that basic principle: theirs is a medium of tight control, leavened only by occasional bursts of raw sound--because tastefulness can only get you so far, right?
While there's plenty of ambient space on here--as well as compositional space, as on the 20-minute album-ending "Public Remains", which spends its first half drifting and slowly building. By the time the eight-minute mark rolls around, we're in heaving, roiling open water, full-on Svarte Grenier territory, but executed with a sense of rhythm and feeling to rival the brooding atmosphere. It doesn't just sound like a boat, that would be too easy and too practical. Sightings turn it into an epic Nantucket sleighride of a piece, fighting, kicking, seething and bubbling before finally sinking beneath its own weight. It's hard to forget that Sightings are astute students of Insect Death and the hard-won visceral punishment of No Wave: there's an intense physicality to this music, almost like Ligeti. Their music weaves a hallucinogenic spell around broken instruments and hissing amps, so it's totally appropriate that they sit on the furthest fringe of the noise scene, on Mouthus' label Our Mouth. Mouthus are one of the few other bands that I hear making broken music for healing: sinister ambience that encroaches and recedes without threatening, yet fluctuating enough to draw the listener in.
This is dark music, a thick brine within which to marinate one's own failures. Probably their most nebulous release yet. Considering that the material on their last few releases was inching closer and closer to melody, the decision to make this album less structured (at least in the traditional sense) is a surprise. It shouldn't be, especially when the band is releasing two collaborations with To Live and Shave in L.A.'s Tom Smith--never a sign of compositional focus, but a guarantee of unhinged rawness. With the exception of "Public Remains"' spacious dignity, the rest of the album contains scores of knotted tension, arrhythmic in the extreme. "On a Pedestal" is particularly blistering, with out-of-control feedback guitar two rooms over, and a bass running all over the place, you almost miss the drums, which are reduced to sheering electronic pings and bleeps.
All in all, this album might seem a little long-winded to some, but I find it justifies its length through the blending of the meditative and abrasive, which gives it a unique "eye of the hurricane" feel. Cozy chaos. While most artists who started out in this noisy vein (Black Dice, the Chromatics, etc.) are pursuing more structured sounds and the attendant audience that brings, it's refreshing to see a band like Sightings pursue their muse, even if that pursuit occasionally leads them off the side of a cliff.
While there's plenty of ambient space on here--as well as compositional space, as on the 20-minute album-ending "Public Remains", which spends its first half drifting and slowly building. By the time the eight-minute mark rolls around, we're in heaving, roiling open water, full-on Svarte Grenier territory, but executed with a sense of rhythm and feeling to rival the brooding atmosphere. It doesn't just sound like a boat, that would be too easy and too practical. Sightings turn it into an epic Nantucket sleighride of a piece, fighting, kicking, seething and bubbling before finally sinking beneath its own weight. It's hard to forget that Sightings are astute students of Insect Death and the hard-won visceral punishment of No Wave: there's an intense physicality to this music, almost like Ligeti. Their music weaves a hallucinogenic spell around broken instruments and hissing amps, so it's totally appropriate that they sit on the furthest fringe of the noise scene, on Mouthus' label Our Mouth. Mouthus are one of the few other bands that I hear making broken music for healing: sinister ambience that encroaches and recedes without threatening, yet fluctuating enough to draw the listener in.
This is dark music, a thick brine within which to marinate one's own failures. Probably their most nebulous release yet. Considering that the material on their last few releases was inching closer and closer to melody, the decision to make this album less structured (at least in the traditional sense) is a surprise. It shouldn't be, especially when the band is releasing two collaborations with To Live and Shave in L.A.'s Tom Smith--never a sign of compositional focus, but a guarantee of unhinged rawness. With the exception of "Public Remains"' spacious dignity, the rest of the album contains scores of knotted tension, arrhythmic in the extreme. "On a Pedestal" is particularly blistering, with out-of-control feedback guitar two rooms over, and a bass running all over the place, you almost miss the drums, which are reduced to sheering electronic pings and bleeps.
All in all, this album might seem a little long-winded to some, but I find it justifies its length through the blending of the meditative and abrasive, which gives it a unique "eye of the hurricane" feel. Cozy chaos. While most artists who started out in this noisy vein (Black Dice, the Chromatics, etc.) are pursuing more structured sounds and the attendant audience that brings, it's refreshing to see a band like Sightings pursue their muse, even if that pursuit occasionally leads them off the side of a cliff.
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