Sunday, September 2, 2007  3:56 pm 

Metamorphoses

20JFG is about many things, one of them is change, since we tend to be for people who push things forward, or people who pushed things forward, or people who look back in style to people who pushed things forward, we enjoy the dynamism of our culture, where the driving impulse is a creative one, of curiosity, investigation, expression and connection with like-minded spirits, we respect that so much we have created a dark bodily shrine which goes from a corner above the sizzling snake pit of our lizard brains through the spine into our heart’s ventricules, you don’t know where else, like one of Brian Lumley’s vampires, it’s a messy thing of blood, flesh, brain tissue and electric synapses going clack clack clack like some drunken garage kid snapping his fingers to a monks tune, we wouldn’t have it any other way, WORD.

I wasn’t initially convinced by Numbers’ transmogrification from masters of all things spazzy into indie rock post-shoegazers, it wasn’t that I thought what they were doing was bad, it’s just that I fucking loved their Mk.1 incarnation as hysteric masters of stripped down taut synthetic no wave devo-tionism, do you perhaps remember ‘Too Cool to Say Hi’ the best expression of I can’t see without my hipster karma detection horn-rimmed glasses agony ever committed to tigermusic?

Numbers- Too Cool to Say Hi

But then things change and too many years spent making two minute long short-circuited spazzy robo-stomping capsules might have been tiresome for our restless Numbers, dynamism is an arrow shot into space, hence ‘Now You Are This’, their new album, which I have been listening and enjoying very much, keyboard driven sci-fi exploration into the abyss of Proxima where Stereolab’s rocket crashed some time ago, deep sound engulfs you like the Solaris ocean bringing to mind all sorts of Retrofuturistic memories.

The song I am liking most is one which runs a tad faster and contains in it the jerky genetic code of old Numbers, if only twitching inside an egg-shaped chair like Broadcast’s anphetamined little sisters, you can see them live in Rapture’s Arcadia Festival once we sort out the splicer mess our little underwater utopia finds itself in right now.

Numbers- Everything is Fine

Old Time Relijun haven’t really changed that much in their new Catharsis Crisis album out on our beloved K Records, but then their stuff has always sounded like our favourite Brainbite toting celtic hero Slaine undergoing a warp spasm where he becomes a fang-head-spouting-muscle-coiling mess which ‘knows neither enemy nor foe’, I think the latter isn’t the case with Old Time Relijun, though, if their furious expeditions into the wilderness show something, it is that they are, most definitely, on the side of Life in all it’s bloody rotting shitting glory, Arrington de Dionisyo throat vomiting sound bile will make you twitch like an illness.

This is party music for a Werewolf Church with hymns written by the Birthday Party, black creatures dance in the dark, blood spills and less shapes go back out in the forests than did come in, such capers. Did you ever wonder what the Contortions would sound like if they had been produced by the RZA? You’re quite fucked up aren’t you?

Old Time Relijun- Veleno Mortale

labels >> SciFi, numbers, paganism