Just a fraction over a year since their last album, ‘Guider’, Disappears are back with album number three. Steve Shelly of Sonic Youth, who occupied the drum stool on the last tour, is now a permanent fixture in the lineup, and they recorded the album at Sonic Youth’s Echo Canyon West Studio. What they’ve emerged with is a record that’s lean and mean and dangerous sounding.
Iggy Pop’s perhaps the most obvious reference point, at least in terms of the drawling vocal delivery: musically, ‘Pre Language’ bucks and sneers and manages to be punchy and expansive at the same time. ‘Replicate’ makes for one helluva way to start an album and suggests that on ‘Pre Language’ Disappears have made a huge leap beyond the Black Angels-like reverby guitar drone of its predecessor. Sure, the reverb’s still there in cavernous quantities, but the swampy psychedelia has given way to an altogether more direct, forward-facing rock sound.
It’s a solid set that shows they’re still committed to the groove that made ‘Guider’ such a good album. If anything, ‘Pre Language’ is even better, and while its press release informs us that it’s an album about love, it’s hardly happy clappy, being dark, gritty and seedy, with an overriding post-punk vibe.
|
‘Hibernation Sickness’ whips up a blisteringly frenzied crescendo, while the sparse, echo-soaked guitar work on ‘Minor Patterns’ is more reminiscent of ‘Unknown Pleasures’ era Joy Division. The wandering guitar line that dominates ‘All Gone White’ creates a tripwire tension that’s sustained through the relentlessly rhythmic ‘Joa’ which follows.
The slowed-down looping bassline and strictly functional, stripped-back beat of ‘Love Drug’ is the closest they come to the sound of the previous album. Sandwiched in between the pacier, punchy ‘Fear of Darkness’ and the simmering finale that is ‘Brother Joliene’, it’s a shimmering, spiralling wall of sound that culminates in a crescendo of truly colossal proportions is supremely effective.
‘Pre Language’ shows Disappears are developing and pushing in new directions. It’s also a cracking album in its own right.
Disappears Online
|
