Why do we listen to music? The standard answer would be “because we enjoy it”, but the language used to praise “Extreme Music” often suggest the very opposite of enjoyment. We often describe the albums we love as “harrowing”, “inhuman”, “torturous” – to people who don’t know the language of Metal, it’s not clear why these are good things.
With For Mass Consumption (Iron Lung Records), PHT’s Jon Kortland has created music which reminds us why those adjectives are usually reserved for bad things. That much-abused label “Industrial” is the most relevant here, in the form presented by Leechwoman and early Godflesh – cold slabs of alienating, joyless noise generated by guitars and electronics, topped by abrasive shouted vocals and stark aesthetics. This is bleak, amelodic music focussed on repetition and suffocating rhythms.
If you’re thinking that it sounds pretty good, that’s because you’re missing a key factor. In one of the strangest musical decisions since letting Phil Collins sing, every track on For Mass Consumption is around forty seconds long. Plenty of Grind bands have made compelling albums with shorter tracks, but they do this by maintaining a furious pace and layering tracks together so that song-change is essentially key-change. With Pig Heart Transplant, practically every track starts with a slow build-up, gathers momentum until it seems about to go somewhere, then stops and lets the cycle begin again. It’s like an album of intros, to the extent that I actually checked that I hadn’t been sent an advanced release with only samples of each track – but no, this is how it’s meant to sound. It’s frustrating, because there are several moments on the album when they start to overcome the limitations of their sound and build up an effective atmosphere, but it’s over in seconds and the slow build starts again.
No doubt I’m missing the point. Kortland has clearly set out to create an album which alienates, confuses and prevents anything as crass and obvious as enjoyment, and he’s doubtlessly succeeded – I just can’t honestly recommend that anyone listens to it.
3/10
RICHIE H-R