Thursday, September 6, 2012

Climax Denial – The Absolute Bottom

2008 • Husk Recordings

Sometimes when I hear an artist like this I have to wonder if they were the kind of people who hear something and thing "heck, I could do that" and proceed to totally screw it up. Maybe Climax Denial is one such artist. Okay, it's not bad, but it's a pale imitation of all the good noise I've ever heard and feels very amateurish.

The Absolute Bottom is fairly typical power electronics: cold and clinical one-track noise with incomprehensible distorted and shouted vocals. Nothing your average Sutcliffe Jügend or Whitehouse album doesn't do. The noise textures can get quite harsh, almost wall-like at times, with the occasional pain-inducing high tones that I suppose you can't do power electronics without. (I'm not joking about the pain—don't listen to this with headphones. It's not fun.) Other times things are a bit quieter, like the more ambient and distant last two tracks, so there is a little bit of variety overall.

But The Absolute Bottom doesn't do a whole lot to excite me. It's alright music but it doesn't bring much new to the table—compared to my review of Genocide Organ's Remember, at least there they brought some variety and other influences to the party. Climax Denial is more "pure", you could say, most prominently in the longest track "Just a Body", thirteen minutes of basically the same harsh noise sound. Other tracks have a bit more going on, like the screeching synth noise in "Tapeworm Agility" that complements the grinding background noise well, but it doesn't get much more diverse than that. Some people will like that and others won't, of course. For me, it makes the album off as more of a novelty than anything.

No matter how many times I listen to it, Climax Denial just doesn't grab me. It simply exists, filling up the empty space but going nowhere and doing nothing. So it makes okay background noise but I really don't see a lot of reason to listen to it otherwise.

4

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