MAKING – High Life (2015)

This is what it sounds like, when doves vomit.

That is intended to be a compliment. It’s quite obvious that Sydney’s Making never set out to make music that was easy to listen to. In their prolonged but eventual debut High Life, melody is a luxury. The album an unashamedly cacophonous discourse of over-driven bass, battering percussion and brooding electronica. The vocals, where they occur, are repeated in uncomfortable monotone. The keys are as darkly menacing as the noise rock surrounding them, and give the album almost cyberpunk aesthetic, something that would fit quite nicely as the soundtrack for Tetsuo: The Iron Man. So one may be excused from feeling discomfort as ugly atonal distortion is juxtaposed with the repeating chant “dream job, dream job, dream job, dream job, dream job“.

But I’m sure that Making harbor no apologies here. High Life is a rich slurry of dissonant avant-punk noise. While the sound is unmistakably Making, one may be reminded of the distorted electronic noise of HEALTH and The Locust, the dissonance of My Disco and Nitkowski, and the noisy bludgeon of Shellac. This is a record that walks the trapeze between euphoria and nausea, making (pun) it a challenging listen at times, but undoubtedly a rewarding one.