On Trve (Pelagic Records), Love Sex Machine returns eight years after their second album Asexual Anger with noise-driven sludge metal sound that will likely plant a feeling in the listener’s heart that bad times lie ahead for the world.
With the album’s extra-terrestrial cover art and track titles like “BODY PROBE”, there is a sense that Trve fell from the sky, having been birthed by aliens. The music contained within does little to dispel that impression, with the album being a noisy 10-track, 35-minute barrage, like a distorted signal captured by a giant radar. In fact, Trve is the product of four humans from Lille, France.
Referring to themselves as “Suicidal Nihilistic Sludge”, there’s certainly an air of the apocalyptic about Trve, with the deep, rumbling, mid-paced, doomy, metallic drone bringing to mind Neurosis.
The previously-mentioned lead single “BODY PROBE” may be the album’s most effective demonstration of nihilistic horror. Fluidly jumping between 3/4, 2/4 and 4/4 time signatures, the riffing itself is melodically simple. As with a lot of the album, the band tends to dig-in on a one-note riff and hammer away to a point of almost hypnotic repetition. Sure, here and elsewhere the tracks do tend to evolve, but not dramatically. In general, the listener is sucked into this oppressive, relentless, dark cycle, the melodic and rhythmic variations being like a brief explosion before the track’s inevitable, gravitational pull reasserts itself.
From a tonal point of view, it’s very impressive and if you want bleak, you got it. The vocals are distorted and snarled (and for the most part pushed back in the mix, like they’re raging from the depths of the void), the riffing is down-tuned and overdriven, the drums a series of thudding hammer blows.
What’s true of the focussed tone, (with subtle deviations within tracks), is also true from one track to the next. Love Sex Machine never deviates dramatically from the formula apparent by third track “TRAPPED FOR LIFE”. “TEST26” offers impactful, almost-tribal drumming, “CANOPY” some notable drum rolls, in “BROKEN CODE” there’s some fire in the track’s see-saw guitars and a brief flash of variety to the usually distorted shouting of the vocals. This is even more pronounced on “AUTISM FACTOR” (another album highlight) which includes some low spoken word passages, as well as some interesting experimentation with time signatures (though on that point, it’s not always sure if the time signatures shift, as the band does a good job of creating odd rhythms sometimes).
All that said, despite the album’s not-especially-long run time, the unchanging tone and fairly regular tempos and textures leave the album as a whole feeling like it might benefit from some more dynamics. Evoking Neurosis isn’t necessarily such a flattering association — with the US sludge veterans being so adept at building intensity and interspersing their sludge metal rhythms with ambient passages.
Then again, not all music needs to be about building to a payoff. Trve is an intense, noisy, enveloping and otherworldly listening experience. Not that many aliens drop from the sky sounding quite like this one.
Buy the album here:
https://lovesexmachine.bandcamp.com/album/trve
7 / 10
TOM OSMAN