From time to time, we run into a band like Germany’s Lingua Nada and we pose ourselves the following quasi-philosophical question: does a band start with chaos and shape it into coherency, or do they start with coherency and shape it into chaos?
This little Gordian knot is at the center of Snuff, which we are more-than-proudly streaming this week. Every track on this brand new effort from the Liepzig four-piece has our heads crunching on the chaos-coherency dichotomy. ‘Svrf Party’ kicks the album into life with palatable Wavves-esque surf-rock pop, quickly metamorphosing to abrasive, pedal-stomping spazzcore, which had me quickly conjuring up bands like The Locust, An Albatross and the early work of yo’ boys Tera Melos. ‘Mechakintosh’ shifts impetuously from thrashy skate punk to a gaze-y slow-jam with the flick of a switch. There’s the off-the-wall chiptune of ‘Snuff’; the psych-folk of ‘Le Magnus’; and don’t even get me started on my personal highlight ‘A Netflix Original’, which juxtaposes unadulterated cybergrind madness with cutesy-boots pop sensibilities. The cuts are so sharp, the musical journey so dissonant, that the easiest thing to do in this album is sit back, embrace and assume nothing.
And so here we are. Is Snuff an album of chaos made coherent, or vice versa? We may never know the answer. At any rate, Snuff is a showcase of erratic but greatly rewarding music-making from a band deprived of ritalin. It’s like the colours of the rainbow punching you in the face.
Snuff is out will be out tomorrow you betcha via Kapitän Platte and Dog Knights Productions . Get yer hands dirty.