Xinlisupreme - Tomorrow Never Comes
(Fat Cat)
And sometimes they just fall into your lap. At least that's how FatCat came to know and love Xinlisupreme, the duo of Yasumi Okano and Takayuki Shouji, whose demo arrived at the label's London headquarters from out of nowhere. Or, more accurately, from Oita, Japan. Anyone hearing the track that leads off Tomorrow Never Comes should appreciate FatCat's excitement. Admittedly spectacular, "Kyoro" wastes no time in unleashing a feedback squall of fearsome proportions—ravishing in its own noisome right, even if not for the melodic guitar shapes struggling against the corrosive din of supersaturated electroacoustics, two-note bass blurt, and muffled drum clatter. The mind scrambles to lock onto a simple formula—Psychocandy + Rainbow Electronics-era Merzbow? (Isn't Anything x Suicide) / Metal Machine Music—that might digest, rationalize, and thus neuter the overwhelming effect of the cyclonic barrage.
With just over three minutes to cogitate, one is unlikely to reach a satisfying conclusion before Xinlisupreme proceeds to shuffle the deck thoroughly, and inexplicably. An hour of uncompromising "Kyoro"-style noise/bliss synthesis would have been most welcome. Instead, Tomorrow Never Comes reinvents itself at every other turn, offering lo-fi dream-pop chords and feedback salvos one minute, gritty power electronics or terse anti-ambient sample spatter the next.
Resembling a mix tape assembled at random from selections of second-tier shoegaze and outtakes culled from Pan Sonic, Conrad Schnitzler, and one of those odd Dadaist outfits to emerge from the "Industrial Music" camp (HNAS? DDAA?), much of the album is more entertaining than it is cohesive. With little apparent sense of purpose, the constant juxtaposition of semi-song, ominous clanging and banging, and atmospheric collage (often within the same track) just seems as off-kilter and perplexing as the project's awkward title. Such tactics work in Xinlisupreme's favor as often as not, though, paying off surprising dividends in the deftly sustained melody/mayhem tension of "Fatal Sisters Opened Umbrella."
Arriving after "Untitled," a brief but disproportionately irritating foray into the muddled-breakbeat genre, the portentous post-punk plod "Fatal Sisters..." takes a sudden leap into the dizzying feedback-as-melody delirium of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Where an earlier, dronier attempt, the pre-LP 7" single "All You Need is Love was Not True," never quite got itself off Mogwai-like middle ground, here a magnetic, sub-Manchester beat, overloaded lo-fi production, rafts of gale-force guitar, and a nagging melodic motif maintain their stupefying combined effect even as the track glides past the 12-minute mark. Whoah. The shakuhachi flute and woodblock insinuations of "Nameless Song" provide a necessary comedown, with a tasty feedback chaser to jolt you back to you senses. An uneven album, then, but one that certainly announces Okano and Shouji as a new force to watch. With a little more focus, these two are capable of serious damage. Stay tuned.
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