CHANG FFOS – trust this arcane device

(LP/CD, Interstellar records/Moon Lee records)

In the last issue of Big Load magazine Peter Balon and me in parall but unconnected action within our articles about Todd and Monno respectively asked the question as to why there is, once again, a small but noticeable trend amongst alternative music listeners towards noise rock and really heavy, sometimes mushy and unidentifiable guitar distortion. For one we both obviously ignored the fact that there always was heavily distorted and pounding guitar music all the time, even after AmRep-records closed their doors and Killdozer stopped touring. For second, if you add early Neurosis into a matrix with the other two bands mentioned above you’ll get a pretty close picture of what Chang Ffos are about. (Actually, one should always write “the mighty Chang Ffos”, to keep things in the right perspective.) There always was an important and interesting strand of noise rock that was heavily influenced by metal and psychotic drugs, turned into sludge core and from there laid down the basis for Sunn0))), Thrones and what else. I remember names like Lumen (who are still around), Christdriver and Counterblast, who a mile below Neurosis in the realms of the global DIY-hardcorepunk scene carved a testament of a very special kind of noisecore into stone. Now the mighty Chang Ffos are here to revive, relive and enlarge that vision. Especially when Hydrahead is turning more and more wimpy, but that is of no interest here. Well, mayebe it is. We’ll see when that new record by Jesu (which I keep reading about but see nowhere) hits my turntable.

If you dared to view “trust this arcane device” simply as a metal record, you’d really have to reach out and include doom-rock into your equation of metal as well as dark ambient noise. A hard task for any decent reviewer in Rock Hard, Metal Hammer or any other guardians of generic factors in a certain genre. The simple and everlasting definition of “everything that is 100 % metal, is metal. Everything that isn’t 100 % metal, isn’t.” is of course still true. We at Cracked have a special place in our heart for all bands that deftly decide to sit between the stools and instead of deciding for one of two sides opt to go for kicking both against the head. Figurally or verbally. Therefore this album has a lot of parts where apocalyptic riffs and demonic screaming work out a fiery hellstorm of noise, but there are also tranceinducing dark passages of pure noise and some straight forward heavy riffage as well that accounts for the noise rock in big letters. This band spawns over the boundaries of metal and noise rock with the ease of a giant bomber aeroplane, but the mixture is so well balanced that no ingredience sticks out unwelcome and that the slower, less intense (in relation only!) parts are welcome breathing moments for the listener.

Maybe this record after all is too big and heavy for regular metal. (Those dudes with the leather and spikes and make up always seemed like a parade of sissy masketeers to me anway.) It has this double bass drum, demonic screaming, fine subsonic bass harmonies appeal, where a song changes in tone and speed quite quickly if necessary and wallowing in big blasts of distorted sound and clean noise is always a welcome excuse for not doing something else. Any blast to the rotten, stagnating corpse of metal and heavy music in general is a good thing, if we don’t want to be flooded with more boring and generic records.