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 Review archive:  # a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Cory Strand - Punishment Will Be Severe [Occult Supremacy Productions - 2013]

“Punishment Will Be Severe” finds Cory Strand in his extreme remixing ‘n’ reconstructing of female pop music mode. The CDR sees Strand (mainly) using “Bossy”- the 2008 dance pop/electro pop single from female Us pop artists & actress Lindsay Lohan, and deconstructing it into: stretched-out psychedelic tinged drone/noise cross-breeds, distant regal drone drifts, distorted & hazed sonic scaping that shifting into intense almost gabba like contractions, and road drill grinding walled noise.

For those unfamiliar with the original “Bossy” track( as I was)- it’s a rather bouncy slice of four minutes &  eleven seconds worth electro pop. The  track is  built around throbbing & bobbing 80's pop tinged synth textures, slight funk guitar trails, a fixed dance beat, and Lohan’s fairly typical US female pop vocals. For the six tracks on offer here Strand has mostly completely re-constructed, grinded-down, & filtered out the original tracks structure & form. As he cleverly picks out & expands on certain elements & nuances from the orignal track, to create something completely new.

The six tracks last between just under the eight minute mark, to just shy of the nineteen mark. The CDR opens with “Don’t Disobey, Answer to Me”, which is a slow- motion  murky sonic soup of heavily reverberation bass buzz, slow-mo textural simmer, and sludgy dystrophic industrial like drone dirge. It’s a great stark & sludgy opening track, and it rather brought to mind the image of a mass of half dead humans stuck on some vast & grey twenty foot spider web, that's set against a bleak & dying futuristic city scape.

Next we have “Let Me Shine For You”, which is one of the two longest tracks here at just shy of the nineteen minute mark. This track is a truly mesmerizing, harmonic rising yet bleakly focused slice of drone matter- it's built around a hazy & distant drone loop that has an almost regal, golden & hopeful feel to it, yet the hope seems far, far away & we’re now trying to relive it in a bleak & truly hopeless future. Truly this track is a beautiful & haunting piece of work that’s up there with some of Strands best work.

Track number three is entitled “l-la la la la”, and it finds Strand using more recognizable elements of the original track- you can make out Lohan's voice, though it’s reduced to a moving harmonic haze. You can also make out the drum track, and the synth elements- but they are slowed to a reverb soup. For the first half of  it's nine minute  run-time it drifts/ hazes along in a muffled, dreamy & grey psychedelic manner. Then all of a sudden it flips into stuck & manic tone pummeling, which sounds like a gabba track speed-up 100 fold & looped into infinity.

Track four “Please Me And I Will Gladly Brighten You Atmosphere”, is the second long track here at spot on the nineteen minute mark. It finds Strand once more returning to more ambient & drifting territory, with a selection of slowed purring  lower toned harmonic textures, which are over fed by a more piercing high end single pitch. As the track progresses all the tones subtle start to die back until at the end you’ll just left with a very thin line of drone matter.  For me this one of the least effective tracks of the tracks here, as it just really felt like Strand was  treading ambient water focusing on rather bland pitch manipulation.


Track five is the title track, and this sees Strand offering up a truly intense drilling, grinding & teeth gritting ten minutes of industrial ribbed walled noise. The track is built around a thick & tightly woven selection of fixed juddering noise tones, which take in more crisp & coarse static tonality, to more road drilling texturing, to pummelling grey droning texturing.  And as the track goes on you can make out this great hovering & bleak drone sustain wiith-in the pit of the wall.

The release is finished off with “What Do You Really want?”. And this is the only track that doesn’t utilize elements from the original “Boss” track, instead instead it uses elements of another Lohan track “ Rumors”. This 7.51 track  is a bit like the first track “Don’t Disobey, Answer to Me”, with it’s mix of bass bound reverberation & skittering ‘n’ grating textural elements. But there’s also a great mixture of brooding & chilling harmonics here too, and these take the form of jingle/ scraping tonalities with the odd dip into deep subterranean drone submersions.  All told it’s a  great moody & darkly cinematic end to this releases.

For the most part “Punishment Will Be Severe” is a very worthy, creative & rewarding release that finds Strand mining Ms Lohan’s  pop work for decidedly un-pop like mood-scapes that go from: darkly atmospheric, onto grimly psychedelic, through to noisily intense.

Rating: 3 out of 5Rating: 3 out of 5Rating: 3 out of 5Rating: 3 out of 5Rating: 3 out of 5

Roger Batty
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