Despite the moniker suggesting otherwise, United Scum Soundclash aren’t a hardcore punk band. In fact, their objective is to ‘pave new roads towards the creation of a musical form devoid of any pretext, revelling in style-bending encounters of creative oddity’. And on ‘Machine Gun’, they most certainly achieve this.
‘Air Attack Whispers’ is constructed around a gentle piano motif, overlaid with a host of samples, with television dialogue and the sounds of helicopters cut through with gunfire. In many ways, it sets the tone, but somehow doesn’t prepare the listener for what’s to follow.
‘Sevad Kooh’ suddenly bursts out in a lumbering monolithic riff reminiscent of ‘Half Life,’ off the Swans album ‘Cop’ - topped with an expansive blast of sax courtesy of Steve Mackay, who’s clearly been keeping himself extremely busy of late. This tapers off to leave only the superheavy percussion, before sparse instrumentation returns, weaving a math-informed post-rock sonic tapestry, before finally samples of voices and more shootings return to the fade.
Eastern promise and seedy downtown jazz seep together over a strolling bass on ‘Chasing the Asbestos Cloak’, which builds to incorporate a host of sounds from distant screams to less identifiably-sourced incidentals and reaches an almost excruciating intensity, a feat repeated on ‘Neon Landings’, where the drums come through so hard and heavy at one point that it feels like you’re in the room with the kit before once again a hail of gunfire brings the red curtain down.
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Disparate as the music is stylistically, discord and gun shots recur with more than enough frequency to provide a sense of cohesion, while the production ensures the dynamic range comes through to full and occasionally nauseating effect, with the fourteen-minute ‘A Vision in a Mirror in a Movie in a Dream’ evolving through a great array of atmospheres and shiver-inducing moments of eeriness, not to mention punishing crescendos.
Warped rollin’ blues and monumentally weighty percussion dominate the dialogue that runs through the baked sonic landscape of the closer, ‘Salamander Devil’, which appropriately ends on a loop and one final crack of a pistol. Rather than being overkill, it serves to reinforce the U.S.S. ethos of music without an agenda: one doesn’t come away with the sense that they’re in any way glorifying violence or killing, so much as using the sound of guns – machine or otherwise – and one more instrument in their sonic arsenal. The result? One of the most innovative, fresh and high-impact improv-based albums I’ve heard. Period.
United Scum Sounclash Online
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