Thursday, October 24, 8 p.m.
Rozz-Tox, 2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island IL
Los Angeles' industrial post-punk darkwave project All Your Sisters and Denver’s industrial crew Echo Beds take the stage at Rozz-Tox on October 24.
The Bay Area-based record label The Flenser has been on the cutting edge of dark, doomy music for 10 years by this point, releasing everything from the noise-collage metal stylings of Wreck & Reference to the post-classical prog histrionics of Kayo Dot to the “What the hell is this??” one-man black-metal experiments of The Botanist – along with projects that fit into far too many diverse styles to get into in any concise fashion here. Its roster has become a who’s-who of U.S. and international undergrounds, and attests to how genres including industrial, noise, and metal still have plenty of room to grow into even bigger ideas and sonic forms. The Flenser is home to the most recent releases by both touring bands that land at Rozz-Tox on October 24, and this fact alone promises that the sounds you’ll hear at this show will challenge your expectations as much as entertain you.
All Your Sisters clearly draws inspiration from the roster of another trailblazing label (and precursor, in some ways, to The Flenser’s eclectic catalog): Chicago’s Wax Trax. The constantly churning arpeggiated basslines and brutal drum-machine programming, coupled with the shouted vocals and metallic guitar screech, evoke Ministry at its peak. Like Ministry's, All Your Sisters' music doesn’t make you choose between full-on head banging and more body-shaking dance grooves – it encourages both at once, and blurs the distinction between the two. Check out “Dividing Lines,” a highlight from their excellent 2019 LP Trust Ruins,to get a sense of what the project brings to the table. The electronic drums prove to be more than just a simple kick-snare pattern, jutting out into moments of tom-tom fills and weird, on-a-dime shifts in rhythm, all frosted with jittering hi-hat accents. The vocals hit that sweet spot somewhere between savage martial shouting and that brand of willfully skewed, mumbled melody that sounds like a pop performance put through a wood chipper.
Album closer “The Deceiver” links up the kinetic drum machine beats with a twitchy synth bass patch that bounces between two notes like a mutated basement version of The Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance.” When the track splits open and a wall of harsh guitar texture cuts through the percussion every once in a while, it feels like the onset of some epic emotional catharsis – like some moment of dark clarity within the mosh pit. When the guitar starts to grind through more legible riffs, the song feels like a lost b-side from Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt EP, managing to be funky and danceable while still exuding noise and harsh texture.
The Flenser label-mates Echo Beds, from Denver, serve as a striking counterpoint to the more song-shaped output of All Your Sisters. While typically presented short bursts, the band’s music streaks off into far more abstract territories, encompassing junkyard noise, atonal electronics, and “maximum volume yields maximum results”-style metal brutality. Like All Your Sisters, Echo Beds exploits drum machines to wonderfully foul purposes, burying a set of pummeling beats behind walls of hellish guitar squeal and abused synth voices. The band has an acute sense of narrative motion, and even though the individual building blocks of their tracks are each abstract and unconventional, they manage to piece together arcs than span more than just pure savagery. The title track of the band's most recent release Buried Language starts in a manic state of high-BPM drum patterns and chiming, dissonant guitar work before climbing up the intensity scale with the addition of absolutely crushing samples of broken glass, each of which serves as some twisted incarnation of a snare drum on the grid.
Buried Language never stays in one place for too long, and while the atmosphere is always bleak and overbearing, the band clearly has plenty of ideas to try on for size. Album closer “Still Body” coasts through waves of harsh static and delayed synth lines into a tom-heavy drum machine beat that takes up a little more space in the mix than other tracks’ buried rhythmic backbone. This feels like the ensemble's most anthemic material even as it takes hard left turns into obscured noise textures and barely-there whispered vocals. When the track crumbles into silence, it feels like a welcome reprieve, but the downright nasty, squelchy baseline that emerges from the gloom lets us know that the show is far from over. The overall effect, as with All Your Sisters’ music, honors the history of industrial music as a logical extension of dance pop, trading in peppy synth lines for atonality and noise while maintaining a heavy sense of groove and a fine ear for dynamic arrangement.
All Your Sisters and Echo Beds perform on October 24 with a set by Iowa's own Archeress, admission to the 8 p.m. concert is a $5-10 sliding scale, and more information is available by calling (309)200-0978 or visiting RozzTox.com.
