ALBUM REVIEW: Strobe Light Shadow Play – Lower Automation
It was only last year that LOWER AUTOMATION hit us with their eponymous debut full-length, and yet they’ve come back soon enough with another LP in the form of Strobe Light Shadow Play. The work rate makes a lot of sense when you hear the music, as this record, like the one before it, reveals a band whose energy is completely impossible to contain.
Quite mercifully given the chaos it has to offer, Strobe Light Shadow Play is a short affair. It clocks in at just 22 minutes, which makes it one longer than its predecessor, but if that has you expecting something slight and simple you’re in for quite the surprise. There are albums three times this length, and even whole discographies, that struggle to get as much done as LOWER AUTOMATION do here. We count at least six different ideas in opener Jesus Loves Me And My Guns, for example, and that one’s not even a minute long. It serves as something of a warning shot for what’s to come – a deranged, angular affair that will require a fair few listens before you can even begin to unpick what’s going on.
As such, though billed as their noisiest and most experimental release to date, it can be a little hard to distinguish between this record and the band’s debut. It definitely still sounds a lot like THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN trying to kill AT THE DRIVE-IN for example – which make no mistake we mean as practically the highest compliment one could pay any band. It also still feels a lot like it could all fall apart at any minute, especially on a track like Lobby which starts out sounding like bassist Brian and guitarist Derek have each forgotten that the other existed and just decided to play whatever takes their individual fancies instead.
And that’s arguably what makes this record so brilliant. Strobe Light Shadow Play will be completely impenetrable to plenty of listeners even among more extreme spheres of music, and yet there’s just something so wildly compelling about it. It’s got that hard to nail feeling where you can almost picture the band bringing it to life before you, as though they’re working it out as they go along and you’re just the lucky fly on the wall that gets to watch it happen. It does mean that it all tears by in a manner that makes picking highlights largely impossible, but it’s certainly much better just to let the band wind their spidery fingers around your brain and squeeze as hard and as often as they can.
As if more chaos was needed, penultimate track Heel Marks sees the trio add some brass to the cacophony for one of the record’s more immediately memorable moments, and before you know it closer End Scene has brought a reasonably abrupt end to this bewildering yet mesmeric experience. LOWER AUTOMATION may have their eyes on a very specific and often quite hard to please niche, but with Strobe Light Shadow Play they hit a standard of nauseating intensity that could spin the heads of even the most seasoned mathcore and noise rock fans – which, we should emphasise once more, is a very good thing indeed.
Rating: 8/10
Strobe Light Shadow Play is set for release on November 22nd via Zegema Beach Records.
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