Simon Topless is clearly one crazed individual, and his music is all about throwing absolutely everything into the blender with the lid off and seeing what sprays out onto the kitchen walls. Genre? The DiW website summarises fairly succinctly the genre-straddling car crash of noise you can expect: ‘Laptronica, Post-Gabba, Blip-Hop, Glitch-Hop, Chip-Hop, 8-bitronica, Wreckstep, Kronk, Bootmash, Breakcunt, Dub-Bass Splattercore, Harsh Clunge, Fuckstep, Thugstep, Powerpop, Noisewhore, and Wrongtronica...’ If that was written up with a straight face, I’ll buy the man a pint.
Less of an album and more of a riot of experimentalism in the studio, ‘Honey You Tore Me Apart Last Night’ clouts the listener from all angles and makes absolutely no apologies for the chaos it brings.
The trip begins with the 13-minute explosion that is ‘Acid Peel’ that begins as a chilled sounding piece of world music – more Bhundu Boys than ‘Gracelands’, before going completely haywire, with deep grooves warping against stop-start beats, samples from every imaginable source landing with haphazard abandon and by the end it feels like you’ve experienced an entire album’s worth of brain-bending cut ‘n’ paste electronica. But of course, it’s just the entree.
Noodly doodly chip tunes collide with Bollywood soundtracks to forge the unlikely industrial-strength mess that is ‘Um Bongo Slut Tribe’, and I can’t decide if it’s radical or painfully un-PC, but there’s no time to dwell on such matters because the assault is relentless, and there’s a sleazy theme running thorough with titles like ‘Take Turns’, ‘Wrong Hole’, ‘Cameo Flange’ and ‘If I’m Not Meaty Don’t Force It’ (and I can’t actually decide if ‘Spread it to the Ends’ is sleazy or not). But then, DiW have never really been concerned by matters of taste, or commercial considerations for that matter.
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Things step up a notch with the all-out distortion fest of ‘Worms-Free Since 93’, and there’s no shortage of fat, fuzzy bass frequencies on ‘Wrong Hole’ which immediately follows. It’s dance-orientated electronica, but not in any conventional or mainstream sense. It is, however, borderline psychotic, in every sense, not to mention pretty cool.
2010’s ‘DiWFTW’ might not have been their finest moment, and with mangled bangra smashed against clanking industrial beats ‘Honey You Tore Me Apart Last Night’ may contain many of the same elements, but somehow works that much better – or more dysfunctionally, depending on your perspective. In short, it continues to mine the seam they’ve always mined, throwing everything in the mixer, cranking the dials and spewing out an unholy mess of racket with varying degrees of success. The DiW sound is the very definition of ‘mash-up’, and I can’t help but admire the unstinting commitment to it.
Dressed in Wires Online
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