black dice – repo(sessed)

I really liked Load Blown. I thought it was going to be the best Black Dice ever spewed out. Quite a few of my Black Dice loving friends however, weren’t quite so blown away, as it were. They said, collectively, that it was just that bit too industrial, too heavy, grinding and hard. This was what I liked, although I could see the discomfort that might be caused by the giant leap away from earlier, less subterranean efforts, into a quicksand of nightmarish subtones.

I never thought they’d make another album like Load Blown. But now they’ve made Repo. Repo has brought together that intense electric bottom-feeder sound which made Load Blown so precious to me, and jewelled it with the best of their characteristic scatterings – a bunch of oiks and ooohs, from anonymous electronic sources. They made the machines speak, and they filled them with bass.

By far my favourite track from Repo is opener “Nite Creme”, a swampy, gluttenous romp of power-electronics slowed to a lolloping stroll. That part is great – then the industrial tubes sing out, in melody, echoed by animalistic squawks which hark back to the beginnings of noise and experimentalism, and an ecstasy of sound makes my ears dribble.

Its closest companion is, of course, “Kokomo” from Load Blown, a blinding seige of hyper-mechanical double bass.

Repo is derivative. I think it’s derivative of British industrial noise, Cab Voltaire et al, in it’s use of vocals scrawled in dull concrete and badly recorded. It carries it like I haven’t heard any contemporary act succeed in doing, with finesse, skill and authenticity. Best displayed on “La Cucaracha”.  

Black Dice – Nite Creme

Black Dice – Kokomo

Black Dice – La Cucaracha