THE SKULL DEFEKTS – blood spirits and drums are singing

(CD, Conspiracy)

On their first studio album, after several this and that kind of releases, probably more than a dozen all in all, The Skull Defekts now are all about rhythm. Percussive, repetitive loops of rhythms that chug, stomp, pound and dance around a large fire like a horde of mad medicine men in a midnight ritual. It is a kind of avant-rock funk that knocks down the door when entering, very much like the older dirty noise rock brother of this stupid kind of disco punk that is all the rage ever since The Rapture discovered funk and some bloodynosed zinewriter was digging out Gang of Four again. But the Skull Defekts approach is less gentle, less refined and less distilled – as I sad the madmen older brother that leaves on a metamphetamine trip and doesn’t show up for days because with his kind of strange metabolism MDMA makes him slow.

During the course of the six songs on “blood spirits and drums are singing” the group has a hard time hiding their roots in avant-rock (does anybody remember Kid Commando? It is from before this website started) as well as their interest in No Wave, early Sonic Youth comes to mind a lot but also Cabaret Voltaire, and tribal percussions, that they translate and than evaporate within their own instrumental range. The multitide of layers and the ever shifting patterns between layers and rhythm of course also bring to mind the mighty Can. Sound and rhythm are the basis, which is not only corroborated by songtitles such as “The Sound” (with repeated “the sound the sound” lyrics) or “Rhythm is the key” but mostly by their death defying insistence to pound on and on on a chosen rhythm. Behind the steady bang of the Song “The sound” a lot of noises turn up, get lost again, the rhythm guitar (!) gently shifts the beat from steady to the kind of weird groove that Josh Homme likes to play with a lot of melody and then back to heavy slap noise bass hitting as straight forward as Big Black or The Meters.

Does this kind of rhythm constitute more than a musical choice? It certainly seems that steady pounding rhythms, especially the tribal variety, have an enormous spiritual and ethnical body of ethnological and cultural meaning they carry along. From the secret rituals of indegenious tribes to the sweaty rituals of the avant noise dancefloor, there is a lot of subconscious fodder stuffed into this kind of music. In the Seventies Funk used it to prove that all the world revolves around sex, for centuries armies used them to prove that all the world revolves around death. One of my formative concerts as a young man was Tambours Du Bronx, these dozen or so French working class jocks banging on steel cans producing some fabulous thunder.