| The image on the cover of Octavius' newest record, Audio Noir is a chilling photograph of the inside of a Czech concentration camp and it's a heavy image to live up to. Too often, artists appropriate images of death and tragedy to imbue otherwise limp recordings with a sense of depth. In the process, they often wind up desensitizing us to the very horrors that they are trying to connect with, and so it's no small feat that Octavius has crafted an album of emotional depth and maturity that avoids using the cover as a mere shorthand. Coming from Mush, I would have expected much more in the way of slow, experimental beats here, but instead Octavius employ looped noise, thick walls of guitar, rumbling, gut-thrashing bass and odd vocals as they craft an album of disorienting weight. Audio Noir should not be confused with the dark noise/electronic music that it shamelessly upstages on tracks like "Cellophane" and "Vacant/Panic." Most of the time, the beats take a back seat to remaining collage of noise, and are used only as an accenting flavor rather than the main course in tracks like "Speed Limit" and "Sudden and Increasingly Strange Behavior." With names like Kevin Martin, Daelek, and Miguel Depedro name-checked on the sleeve and the Mush logo on the back, I would have expected the drums to be a more prominent player in Octavius' madness, but Octavius take a wonderfully less-traveled route into song-oriented noise collage and layered, fragmented instrumentation. The production never gets in its own way, allowing the album's weight to impose itself completely. While the group's MPC and turntables are less evident nods to a hip-hop influence, the vocals tend towards monotone half-rapped/half-spoken stories and diatribes that are sometimes lost in the ensuing sonic violence. When I can hear the voice clearly, it's saying something like "There's no speed limit in Germany" which I'm sure relates to the song in a deeper way than I can immediately hear. The great thing is that because Octavius take their work seriously, and because they succeed on so many levels with this record, I am willing to trust that the words I can't hear are working towards something. Even if the lyrical delivery is sometimes clumsy or stumbling across what would otherwise be excellent instrumentals, the rest of the record is so good that those moments aren't the ones that stay with me. There's a dark weight at work here, but like the best literary works of tragedy, it's a cathartic one that somehow transforms dour experience into something uplifting. - The Brainwashed Brain |
2XLP/Out Of Print