TRANSMISSION
– sublimity
(CD,
malicious damage)
Warp seven sucks you into its overwhelming powertow and
you are off to a travel that takes you back in time and through dimensions.
Size does not matter anymore because sound has become so enormously big and
demanding everything in its reach is drawn into a halt and has to bow to its
rhythm. Machines growl, souls whine, a thousand individuals move in unison.
The planet is turning cold and hostile, while technology rules with a
polished deductive logic that is cruel and knows no exceptions.
If a record demands connotations for review that are
straight from sci-fi / cyberpunk novels then there has to be something
special to it. The four musicians forming Transmission have long histories
of bands that were definitely essential in forming the last two decades of
alternative pop music, from Killing Joke the The Orb to The Verve and back.
All of those liked to walk the grey areas between melody and the soulless
clutter of industrial, electro and dub in different measures. Within the
band called Transmission they exercise in drawn, winding, massive depressive
songs that rely on swelling melodies and rhythms which are sometimes close
to the dub-psychosis of Bill Laswell but more often should be simply
described as grinding. They are heavy and powerful and most of the time in
slow beats, which adds to the heavy momentum of the songs. Sometimes big and
slow music is more overwhelming and powerful than superfast,
supercomplicated metal.
For the most time vocals are submerged in waves of
synthesizers. When they are clear, the band sounds very much like The
Mission. With the transcendental aspects still in tact, though. Everything
is being subordinated to the beat, this reckless, straightforward stomping
of big machines. Just take for instance “dance” which has a guitar
sounding like a big piano and the echoey, dark drone on the voice that has
also been used by Andrew Eldritch, Wayne Hussey and the singer of Fields of
The Nephilim, whose name I have forgotten (and which almost exhausts my
knowledge of Eighties gothic rock.) By the way, Gothic music back in the
Eighties was bad ass nihilist, dark and exciting. Nowadays it is a circus
for kids with personal problems and the inability to make friends. Very much
like Emo or Punkrock, it seems. Maybe that is the reason why grown-up mature
music seems to make more and more sense in the Crackedversum. Even when it
draws back to the darkest days of my life as a teenage outsider. A world
where a song like “Confusion” would have been a big hit on the
dancefloors of indie-discos, somewhere between “51st state”
and “Heroes”.
