Viki/Hair Police - split
(Load)
Load Records is a label never afraid to make a mess in the name of good music, and that's a good thing, because the third release in their series of splits is one that leaves a definite ring around the collar. Viki's one-woman electro-scramble does half of the damage, and Lexington, Kentucky's most prodigious sons Hair Police provide the rest of the aural assault.
Viki, a product of Dearborn, Michigan, makes six tracks of bedroom dance music with a slight industrial sensitivity and a clear understanding of the value of some well-placed noise. Built on tight beats and the pulsating grind of her ragged electronics, Viki's contributions to the compilation take the aesthetics of Michigan neighbors Wolf Eyes and meld them with her own brand of booty-shaking crunch. Singing with a strident voice sometimes evocative of another girl who beat a lot of boys at what they thought was their own game, Lydia Lunch, Viki calls from the distance with a steely urgency. Her music speaks equally to mind and body, causing internal strife as the bottom half of the body finds itself dancing while the upper half braces itself for the next grating sounds to make an offensive on the eardrums. This is the soundtrack for the scariest dance party you'll go to this year.
Hair Police's last release was the wonderfully dark and menacing Mortuary Servants 7", which found the lads (now a trio) embarking on some seriously evil musical journeys. Their music on this disc moves in a different direction, or, really, about seventeen at once. The group's normally chaotic take on old-fashioned rock 'n' roll is even more severely mutilated here, and only mangled tendrils of sound are left strewn about as evidence. Partially composed, partially improvised (and they'll never tell which is which), Hair Police's half of the disc is a challenging collage of claustrophobic electronics, heavy distortion, and nearly obliterated rhythms. "Arise!" spends fifteen seconds in warped, but more familiar territory, but the untitled lead-in to the group's half of the disc, along with the last three tracks, feature "reworkings" of the Hair Police sound so butchered that dental records would be needed for their identification. It's hard to tell whether Mike Connelly's vocals and Trevor Tremaine's drums make more than fleeting appearances on the album or whether both have fully joined Robert Beatty in the creation of the electronic bedlam. You've got to hand it to the boys, even if the music can be hard to listen to (and by Hair Police standards, this says a lot), they've truly brought the noise, and after listening to "Not Raft, But Cage," you'll be amazed at just how much easier it is to call Blow Out Your Blood, their last album, Hair Police's version of old-fashioned rock 'n' roll. With even more music soon on its way in the form of Hair Police releases and contributions to compilations, it'll be interesting to see how the group assimilates or abandons this approach as they continue to breathe some jagged breaths into the living corpse that is their golem of rock music.
|
