(Due to Islander being off in Baltimore doing Maryland Deathfest things, we will not have his usual weekend columns, but we do have (at least for today) another vivid review by DGR, who this time takes on a new EP by the crafty UK sonic terrorists who call themselves The Machinist.)
On the shorter and sweeter side of things we find ourselves landing upon the shores of the UK again with a new EP from the group The Machinist entitled Towers.
The Machinist are a self-defined industrial black metal band who cite Anaal Nathrakh and The Berzerker as being close comparisons to their sound. They are a three-piece consisting of a dual-vocal attack, walls of guitars, and enough programmed drums rattling about that it sounds like a hailstorm happening outside.
Towers is a three-song EP, arriving a year after their second full-length album Contempt For Life. And indeed, The Machinist have an overarching theme of dislike for humanity as a whole – as British bands tend to be experts in, disdain ranks fairly high – and if you did not have enough of it with Contempt For Life, Towers is the band on the offensive once again for another about twenty-five minutes worth of music dripping with dislike for the fact that you as a human being dare to exist.
If this is your first exposure to The Machinist then Towers will be a hellish introduction, full of stark song songwriting, bleak atmospherics, ominous keyboards, and throat-rending vocals, which again, happens over only three songs. Perhaps The Machinist are on to something with the Nathrakh comparisons after all.
The shortest song of the three present on Towers weighs in at over six minutes in length and the longest closes the whole affair out at ten. Towers is demanding of a listener’s time then, which means that the actual act of acceding can be a hard bargain for some people if they’re immediately turned off from the word ‘go’.
The Machinist are aware of this but also make no attempts to guide people in through the shallow end on their newest EP. The songs are lengthy because there’re a lot of ideas at play from the three-piece here, but also it starts to feel like the famous monologue from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream wherein The Machinist have created towering monstrosities of music without end and place the listener underneath them while they begin to collapse.
Opener “Sagittarius In Bloom” makes no qualms about the auditory terror it wishes to unleash, starting the song with near-everything ratcheted well past the redline with machinegun-like guitar and that previously mentioned dual-pronged vocal attack spilling forth. It is almost as if you entered the conceptual arc of the song in the middle of it, as if you’d drunkenly stumbled into the middle of the second verse and decided to run backwards during the brief synth break that The Machinist insert before events resume in full ‘destruction mode’.
That the band find time to crush a clean-sung melodic break into the ending of the song so that it has something of a hook will draw a guffaw at first, because the sheer gall of it – after spending five minutes rending the Earth to ash and now we’re going to be ‘pretty’ for a bit.
Again, a multitude of ideas are in play here and just one song travels through black metal, death metal, the crossroads between the two, industrial, spaced-out synth, and whatever genre allows for the screaming-from-hell guitar solo that is placed within “Sagittarius In Bloom”.
“Of Creation And Cancer” is an equally intricate tune, though after following the introductory song all of The Machinist’s musical antics are known, so instead it becomes an exercise in just how well the band can reshuffle them up into a newly twisted form.
“Of Creation And Cancer” is a little more nihilistic in its ideals, and of the many fine lines that are being balanced upon, tilts more in the direction of black metal – noticeable especially on the backing vocals as they’re a little more throat-torn and dramatic sounding than before – yet the song itself is still block stacked upon block, stacked upon block, dedicated in assembly to a monolith of misanthropy.
Lyrically, The Machinist are playing with deeper conceptual ideas of the end of man and the ‘human, demon, satan!’ shout that begins to rear its head near the end of “Of Creation And Cancer” alongside another spaced-out keyboard transition has the same sort of punch-throwing and martial approach that The Antichrist Imperium achieve on some of their heaviest exhortations in musical form. The drums dropping into an almost-breakbeat style approach at the end of the song would equally make the madmen in …And Oceans crack a smile as well.
“Cellular Catharsis” expands upon all of this for as close to eleven minutes as The Machinist can skate. There’re multiple movements of apocalyptic battle taking place over the course of “Cellular Catharsis”, with its sneakily-catchy opening melody quickly immolated time and time again with another rush towards shrill vocal delivery. “Cellular Catharsis” takes the many ideas of Towers and ties them all together for a final closing song, presenting the listener with a knot that could take weeks to untie.
Towers is among a group of releases that many may see as having way more ambition than the band might’ve allowed themselves time to expand upon. The Machinist are performing a herculean act attempting to cram in by sheer force as many of their different elements as possible, to create something so endlessly abrasive at times that it is not a pleasant ‘heavy’ to headbang along to. It is a miserable darkness that pulls together a lot of elements you wouldn’t initially expect to pop up within the boundaries of this segment of metal.
The Machinist make full use of any instrumentation synthesized or otherwise that is available to them, and the neck-wrecking pace that the band keep Towers moving at is just one more block in their eventual monument of destruction. Occasionally they swing a little too hard and descend past utter-disdain into camp territory, but the course either quickly corrects itself or some other new, equally ugly element is introduced that contorts the song into a different twisted beast.
In the end it is the pursuit of their many ambitious ideas that keeps Towers an interesting release for The Machinist. It is not an ‘easy’ twenty-plus minutes to spend with a band but it is one that is capable of turning the world to ash around it from the very start of the EP, making itself ugly by the sheer weight of the noise it is producing.
https://themachinistuk.bandcamp.com/album/towers
https://www.facebook.com/TheMachinistUK/