Third appointment with “sick music for very sick people”, they present, as usual, the Dutch Geishas of Doom.
If until now, in the previous two episodes, ours were very keen to separate the influences, in this round they seem to love the mixture of the various elements much more, centrifuge them and compress them into songs ranging from 49 seconds to a maximum of 2 minutes and 50 seconds.
Already in the messy and crazy hardcore punk of the initial “(Here Comes the) Snakestorm” you can see influences that border on the 90s Noise Rock of bands like Cows and God Bullies, while remaining anchored to crazy rhythms like Black Flag and Circle Jerks .
Pirate Hook is a delusional monologue that starts off as a paranoid Black Flag track from Slip It In and which, in a chorus parody, ends up bogged down in a dissonant and violent ostinato that tastes a lot of Industrial and Sonic Youth.
Nobody Is Bleeding almost seems to smell like KBD-style punk rock if it weren’t for the sibylline and shrill noise that accompanies it throughout its development;
a brilliant idea that almost seems to want to insert itself in a dimension suspended between Punk and Neu! (hypothesis and juxtaposition certainly not unlikely, given that the first agitators of European punk often boasted plays spoiled by the cosmic messengers of Alemagna).
Avoid the Fall looks like an indie rock (the good one, that of Pavement and Built ti Spill) that falls apart, but it’s just a question of harmonies:
the shot, the sound, the voice, the sense of decline, that veiled despair, are all punk stuff.
Even the ending, sudden like a trap, is undoubtedly flammable and stinging material as Punk Rock teaches.
In “Crack” they manage to put together certain proto-punk reinterpretations of early Mudhoney and Halo of Flies with a taste for paranoia and alienation whose nature unequivocally dresses in a patched leather jacket from the 80s bands of Orange County.
Delightful, if not sublime, the dissonant and psychedelic dissertations on the turn of the piece: the only possible drift and, precisely because such, necessary.
Repressive Measures starts with a whistle and you already think of a nice piece of Hardcore and, in effect, it is what it is:
shot, speed, shouted voice, straight to the point (scarcely 50 seconds of song), but the guitars draw melodic harmonies that are foreign to the genre or that, from the genre, have left to look elsewhere:
once again the ’80s of American Hardcore mix with the’ 90s of so-called indie bands … and the piece turns and works like a marvel …
Takes Too Long is the most identifiable song, in terms of genre: compositely Punk Rock, with no ifs and buts, but no less valuable than the others:
an anthem to memorize and repeat in dark moments.
It restores, introduces new lymph, gives new motivation.
And it all ends in the cauldron of Easy God, a brilliant song that boasts a Punk Rock attack but with one of the two guitars playing with effects stolen from the aforementioned Neu! Until, after a minute and a half, this is left alone to outline ethereal landscapes, disturbed here and there by an occasional and desperate battery.
Once, long ago, I interviewed the Geishas of Doom; I tried to investigate their influences but they did nothing but repeat “Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix”: they didn’t convince me at the time and, in the light of this third album, even less;
what they manage to come up with is something that also includes much more and shows a versatility in listening that embraces much more than what one would like to believe: there are almost forty years of frontier music in this 12-minute test and , to carry out an operation of this kind, it takes a great taste that certainly cannot be based only on the 5 or 6 fixed references they cited;
certainly punk is the starting point on which the whole work focuses but it seems to me that GOD always points elsewhere and, this third album, always rigorously self-produced and always on cassette, represents a further development towards an increasingly compact sound and attributable solely and exclusively to the 5 Dutch.
See you, again on these screens, for the fourth appointment!
