PUPILLE / SUPERSTATIC REVOLUTION - split

(CD, Basement Apes)

Quite different menues on the table, both tasty and delicious and both hard to swallow in their own way. But both appetizing enough to make you want to dig in. A double treat of apoclyptic sludge in oversize portions and nobody asking any favours. The world has come to this. Teenagers beat each other up to put movies they made with their mobiles onto the internet. Men kidnap ten year old kids and keep them imprisoned in their cellars for eight years. The commander of a troup of special forces soldiers shouts “jump” to a group of soldiers in a trainings situation of jumping from a helicopter 25 feet down into a lake, but the helicopter is still over land and soldier ends up in a wheelchair. Parents drop their babies out the balcony. One man stabs another to death in a quarrel over a shopping cart. Yes, the world is an evil shithole, but there is no way you cannot partake or play your part. So try to play it right.

Superstatic Revolution hit hard and heavy, with enormous waves of sounds from their instruments and croaky, growling vocals. Like labelmates Elodea they are all about de-evolution and apocalypse, though with an added flavor of psychedelia in some parts, especially during the more silent parts when the bass jingles a few melody notes. They definitely have a background in hardcore / punk of some kind even if the band derives from more grindcore oriented music. (No, it is definitely not all the same.) One of my favorite parts is during the end of the song “Sermons pt.2” where they try to do let some gregorian chant singing into their own music. They nearly get it right. Everything before is more straightforward in their own way.

Pupille on the other hand (with a CD you can’t say on the other side, unfortunately) take the way more difficult approach of trying to find their own definition of post rock. Aside of playing instrumental they do not have a lot in common with Tortoise and friends, they are rather closer musically to bands like Don’t mess with Texas or Natsat, which means fascinating and energizing instrumental rock music that stays aside from superficial posing and trys to emulate the rise and fall of the tide in their dynamics, to move the listener with the long variation of density. And as any good pupil (what a bad bad multi-lingual wordplay) knows, energy can be derived from raising and decreasing density. By the way, there is one track here that has various kinds of vocals from friends and collegues from all over the world. And in contrast to all rules within the broadest context of post rock they add an improvisation called “la muerte, como siempre” to the end of their part and the CD. Which raises the question, why post rock bands usually never seem to improvise?

Finally, Pupille is the more daring and experimental band while Superstatic Revolution has a definitely higher output of energy. But I am sure that the main reason for the pairing of these two bands on one disc is not to point out their differences, but relate to their paralells. Which is much better than putting two bands that sound exactly the same on one record (which is useless in a lot of ways.) Careful consideration should not be overdone, after all if you buy this record, you’ll get both anyway and both are worth the price.