Sightings - Arrived In Gold

Genre rock Publisher Load Records External Links Load Records

NYC noise trio Sightings have always been about the metal. And when I say metal, I'm not referring to Dimebag Darryl's KISS casket, the plates in Metallica's roadies' skulls, or Black Sabbath in general. No: I'm talking about plane crashes, car wrecks, derailed, out-of-control subway trains throwing up sparks as they careen along concrete walls, and welders in full gear using blowtorches. Which isn't to say that guitarist/vocalist Mark Morgan, bassist Richard Hoffman, and drummer John Lockie literally employ any of these sounds on Sightings records, but that they manage to evoke them using rock's standard tools. On 2003's Absolutes, Sightings plied their trade inside a cage of noisy scrapes and jarring dissonance, a thrashing almost tribal in its caveman-like intensity; sometimes their cage *was* their being, crashing and shearing and blaring along with a tenuous logic (see "Anna Mae Wong" for an example).

Arrived In Gold signals a change in their approach: a relative minimalism. Meaning that it's not only possible to understand Morgan's utterances, but that the noise cage is often absent (or tamed) here, the urgent rhythms easier to pick out.

Like a no-wave take on Yello's "Oh Yeah," "Internal Compass" eagerly pits Morgan's squealing guitars against Hoffman's hopscotching bass, resulting in an impossible-not-to-bob-to prehistoric groove. "One Out Of Ten" refuses to fully congeal, light screetch sprays and perforated bups hosting not-quite-regular pounds and Morgan's vocal frustrations. "The Last Seed" oozes paranoia: a cross between blunted, refinery sound pollution, an oft interrupted ping pong match, and ominous, laden-foot pacing. Lockie's ginsu-chop, sheet metal stickwork locks in with the snarling churn of the axes on "Arrived In Gold, Arrived In Smoke" to produce what can best be described as a grinding whirlpool.