Ducks Battle Satan

In my recent explorations of noise I seem to have swerved away from the visceral, horror-metal bands such as Wolf Eyes and Cherry Point. I’ve found that sub-genre of noise to be a bit stale and I’m got way more excited over artists like Daniel Menche and Burning Star Core. Now Menche has supposed to have dabbled in this blacker than thou stuff as well but I haven’t managed to delve that far back yet. Based on  everything I had read and everything I had heard (which granted was limited to youtube videos) about the band, I didn’t feel a huge urge to dabble. What broke the drought was one of the best pieces of music criticism I have read in some time. David Keenan in the Wire was given an entire page to wax lyrical on the death of rock and the importance of bands like Hair Police.

There have been a lot of bands out there who have danced on the line between noise and rock. Shit and Shine, Mouthus, Double Leopards etc. You can add Hair Police to the list but perhaps it’s fair to say they are  slanted towards black metal than  rock itself. For what it is worth I think  Keenan is dead right because sometimes we all need a record like Certainty of Swarms just to kick us put of a complacent musical rut. Hair Police have produced a truely nasty record. What sets them apart is that the music (a term I use loosely   as they produce is not as oppressively relentless as some of their fellow scenesters. All of the light has not been sucked out of the sound. The music is allowed to breath  and take shape. It is an extraordinarily good record an if you’ve dabbled in a bit of this sort of stuff it is a real treat. Definitely one for my best of list for 2008.

This entry was posted on December 20, 2008 at 10:02 am and is filed under Hair Police, Music, noise with tags Hair Police, Music, noise, Wolf Eyes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.