The Nein - Wrath of Circuits

Genre rock Publisher Sonic Unyon External Links Official Website Sonic Unyon

Drum patterns rolling around in their own sweat, nice ugly guitar sounds. Interesting moments of noise to break up the monotony. Not so much songs as abstract sound patterns built upon the aforementioned drum patterns, as on "The Vibe." "Conjugated Reverb" opens with reverbed guitar and spooky percussion, and then opens up into a section in which the singer sings lines like "more comfortable with plastics" and "high-strung but oh so much more than unstable."

They sound dissatisfied with their lot, and good for them. "Heatseeker" employs a stop-start structure with a section featuring a guitar riff that sounds a lot like the one used in the previous song. "Crawl Grow Red Slow" begins with a queasy bit of feedback and ominoso bass and "crawl" and "slow" repeated several times, along with some other words I can't catch. Crawling slowly through some sort of psychic murk.

"Jim Morrison in Desert" features another ugly bass line, what sounds like a disabled helicopter circling overhead, and some (synthesized? sampled?) woodwind sounds. Program music for a dead guy whose prophetic utterances landed him in an apparently untenable situation. The next one is the title track and it's my favorite, as it's a welter of more harsh and ugly sounds that gives way to yep, another creepy bass line over which the singer intones something about "mouth breathers," I think. Guitar sounds derived from Doc at the Radar Station, and the general air of something really bad about to happen is kinda bracing. This also features one of the better guitar riffs on the record, and the bass-drum-guitar bit is even a bit funky here.

All in all, pretty interesting and not a bit uplifting, and with some moments of beauty-in-decay, as on the closer, "Bleeding Elvis." Texturally fairly accomplished and lyrically sardonic. I'm always impressed by a group who can bring off this kind of thing, which treats songform as discrete blocks of near-noise interrupted by almost-reassuring riffs. The Nein achieve a certain twisted grandeur that isn't something I will probably revisit often, but which definitely has its own integrity. As a song suite about the fucked-up era we live in, it has its value as a surrealist tract. And dig the bit of prose included in the CD insert: "Loose-fit deep-fried angry drivers I'm a man of the people and people are food This floor relieves me of geography elements are burning out It's the cage of the modern." Don't we all feel this way from time to time?