Throat’s Bareback (Svart) is the type of album you used to notice getting high marks in magazines like Pitchfork or NME. You know, the types of magazines that you got into for a brief while in college right around the time you started drinking lagers and attempting to smoke cigarettes. You didn’t particularly care for most of the articles, but reading these musical journals sure raised the right flags. You are cultured. You are no longer the rube with the cheap shoes.
But every so often while fingering the pages of the magazine for the umpteenth time and reading through reviews you did find bands or an album worth your time. Throat, and their new album Bareback are certainly worth your time. ‘Safe Unsound’ opens the proceedings and sets you up for jagged noises, sparse beats and Neurosis level dynamic blasts. The music morphs from machine-like sounds to literal metal pieces being clanged together. Sensing the robot apocalypse to come you strap yourself in for more harsh textures. And there are certainly more barbaric sounds on their way – i.e. the musical hellscape that is ‘Shortage (Version)’ – but we have other sonic destinations to visit first.
‘No Hard Shoulder’ has a bounce and rocking energy that wouldn’t be unwelcome on a Nirvana release. Sure, Throat cranks in the industrial noises here and then, but that’s just an effort to keep the listener honest. And while on the classic alternative beat, ‘Recut’ takes strands of genetic code from New York’s Quicksand and Massachusetts’ Cave In and combines them in a mid-tempo stomper that is both melodic and cacophonous. Riffs and raw amplification bred in the Page Hamilton tradition are the lifeblood of the grooving ‘Rat Domain.’ Guitarists Jukka Mattila and Aleksis Juhakoski continue to channel those dirty east coast riffs and grooves onto ‘Maritime’ before totally switching course and devoting half the track to clean and masterful guitar shred.
Throat’s Bareback is an album and possibly a t-shirt for you to impress the locals with while enjoying a pint or two.
7.5/10
HANS LOPEZ