Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new candidate for the 2008 Most Aptly Titled Album award in the form of Hysterics by Rolo Tomassi. To put it simply, this record is bat-shit mental.
Rolo Tomassi would appear to be Britain’s answer to the the Nintendo insanity of HORSE The Band and the spazzcore of Heavy Heavy Low Low, adding a hefty dose of genuinely dark and schizoid undercurrent to the mix. Hysterics burgeons with frantic paces and fractured time signatures, over-the top chromatic riffs and lead lines on guitar and synthesizer, cacophonic cascades of percussion giving way to moments of playgroud horror and tension, vocals both shrieked and murmured… hell, you get all that within the space of a single track.
So “eclectic” would be a fair adjective with which to decorate Rolo Tomassi’s material, as would “exuberant”. You might want to throw in “devil-may-care” as well - Hysterics is an album that makes no concessions whatsoever to mainstream appeal or conventional notions of what makes a good song. It’s a furious collection of ideas, welded together into something surprisingly coherent and articulate, like one of those kinetic scrap-metal sculptures you see at the more esoteric festivals, or some sort of sonic Godzilla cooked up with proscribed genetic science techniques and a hefty beakerful of mutagenic compounds.
Hysterics is surprisingly various, though, both at the level of individual songs and as a whole. Rolo Tomassi are like collage artists, grabbing bits and pieces from a huge swath of sources as their inspiration and filtering them through their own set of aesthetic ideals. Hence the oddball jazz interlude of “Fofteen” that precedes teethgrinding time-bent riffs and squidgy synths backing up someone repeatedly howling what sounds like “Chinese werewolf”; the comparatively straightforward metal mayhem of “Nine”, given some sidespin by the incongruously chirpy synth tone and the gentle clean guitar arpeggio of its second half; the 8-bit epic of “Apology”; or the methamphetamine cop-show theme of “Scars”, all disjointed funk and impossible angles. Hysterics is like a collection of musical M C Escher drawings, etched into rusty steel and twisted through numerous non-Euclidian dimensions.
It should be plain, if I’ve done my job properly, that Hysterics is not easy listening. In fact, it’s exhausting in the same way as repeatedly riding a roller-coaster - the adrenaline high leaves you drained, and the sheer torrent of detail means you never get a moment’s respite from trying to anticipate where the track will go next.
As a result, I can’t imagine Rolo Tomassi being the sort of band you’d listen to very often (unless you’re on some pretty strong medication), but as a musical brain-flush or shock treatment, I can’t imagine anything more effective. Hysterics is, literally, a staggering album, and I will be making a point of trying to catch them live - because it’s on stage that this sort of mayhem is always best experienced.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: electronic, Hysterics, nintendocore, progressive, Rolo Tomassi, spazzcore
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Great record, see my review of “hysterics”: http://xdevx.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/rolo-tomassi-hysterics/