The Skull Defekts - SKKULL [Releash The Bats - 2007]SKKULL is the first sour/ brutal disenchanted sound fruit of this Göteborg noise/ bitter drone collective. It's an album thats built for ultimate discomfort and torture, never really becoming too seething or overloading, this concentrates on being jarring and ill-at-easy. The collective features Joachim Nordwall (Alvars Orkester, ex-Kid Commando, runner of Ideal Recordings), Henrik Rylander (ex-Union Carbide Productions), Jean-Louis Huhta (ex-Anti Cimex, Cortex) and Daniel Fagerström (Chronic Heist, ex-Trapdoor Fucking Exit, 8 Days Of Nothing). They have been doing recent live collaborations with the likes of Damo Suzuki (Can) and Lasse Marhaug, just to name a few. The album is made up of four tracks with each nearing the ten minute mark and each aptly mixing jittering and off angle tones; this is awkward and sour music. Built around pluses, stale dead air drones, and stop-start awkward structures which the collective slowly fill in with electro sonic detail, feedback suffocation and stale clouds of discord and grim cinmatatics. It has this air of sour decay, and unpleasant edginess, like the music has a nervous and oddly sinister twitch about it all. It feels like it will sudden explode, moving away from the slow torture technique and just slit you from ear to ear with brutal pummelling, but it never does it always just keeps on the edge, which is really talent in it’s self. This is music for stale smelling, badly lit corridors lined with doorways, from which behind unspeakable acts are taken out on twitching, often convulsing and bloody bodies. But you never see into the rooms your mind is left to fill in the details, as you doors pass each door you feel sure any minute one of will slide open and you’ll be dragged in. A gruelling and grim exercise in knife edge atmospheric and fear-of-death or worse audio edginess. From the first moments it drags you in, not letting its tight and souring hold on your very being give up until its last sound breath. Roger Batty
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