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artist: Merzbow |
I’m still not sure whether a noisician’s display of awful aesthetics in artwork and/or titles is or could be enough reason to write them off. Over the years I’ve seen some excellent releases packaged in the shittiest of artwork and godawful titles gracing the greatest of sounds, so maybe it doesn’t really say anything. Yet it irks me. If someone so obviously seems aesthetically handicapped in one area, doubtlessly they are going to be similarly debilitated in other areas, right?
What I’ve always appreciated about Merzbow is Akita’s incredible sense of aesthetics. Maybe it’s the years he spent at art academy that provide him with all the cool and conceptual cleverness, but regardless he has always had the greatest eyes and ears for good sounds (Flare Gun, Noisembryo, Batztoutai, and so on), great artwork (the often brilliant collage art on the earliest tapes already speaks volumes) and great titles (which almost without exception have always been highly imaginative and visual).
“Don’t Steal My Goat”, though? I wonder what the man was thinking. Now, I understand the sentiment, and anyone who would pull a goat jacking on my billies is sure to get kicked in the fucking shins, but to choose it as an album title seems something of a stretch. It seems like the definite confirmation of the fact that I can no longer relate; if the slew of forgettable digital releases wasn’t enough already, here there’s no longer even a pretty package wrapped round to make all the mediocrity hurt less.
But maybe I should not judge too soon, and perhaps it works the other way round here. Instead of shit wrapped in solid gold, maybe this is solid gold wrapped in shit? Surprisingly, maybe, there seems to be some truth to the statement. Don’t Steal My Goat is another installment in the recent line of percussion-heavy ‘Bow recordings, and it actually seems pretty decent at that. Now I must admit I’ve always had a weak for the percussion based material (and I’ve dabbled in it myself), so I may not be fully objective here, but the wild overdriven drum bashing underneath a steady if not directionless stream of electronic vomit in Part 1 seems to work well, and the piece sounds more like a noise tribute to free jazz than any of Akita’s work has ever done before (despite his intentions – Door Open at 8AM springs to mind).
The drums, rather than the electronics, seem to shape this work, however, and a Negative Nelly might say that they distract from what might otherwise be bland or unadventurous. Part 2 (which seems to nod back to the 2006 Bloody Sea release on Vivo) lacks the ferocious percussion, and the electronics by themselves here seem to have more trouble making waves (waves, sea, yes that was pretty clever right there). It’s by no means bad, but by no means really good either, and it seems just like another obligatory addition to the growing body of whooping sonar noise I just can’t care for. Part 3 is a track along the lines of Part 1, but it has the disadvantage of the layer of noise being almost embarrassing in places, with a 28.8k modem drowning out both the drums and the crunch for a good part of the track. What little enjoyable texture there is hidden underneath is hardly worth listening for. Part 4 wraps the whole thing up sans the fucked-up drums again, resembling Part 2 in style and method but being slightly more rewarding for its much more enjoyable grainy ground layer. The added textures, however, again do little to improve the whole thing.
In the end, Don’t Steal My Goat doesn’t seem to be a revelation of any kind, and despite some excellent moments and the stand-out opening track, it stands largely as a pedestrian, middle-of-the-road affair that will hardly offend anyone, but that neither seems worthy of the name Merzbow anymore – insofar as that name still has the ring of quality to it for anyone who has heard too much of the mediocre material Akita has released this side of the 00s. Don’t Steal My Goat fits right in with all the other recent Merzmaterial – so it’s up to you to decide whether that stands as a recommendation or not.
