AUTOBAHN
Dissemble
August 21 2015 (Tough Love)
8/10
Words: Linn Branson
Leeds post-punk five-piece have been creating a quiet stir for awhile now over the course of two EPs, and now with this debut full-length (co-produced with Matt Peel) they have the makings of a band very much on the precipice of sonic explosion.
With scorching guitar, razor sharp bass lines, downcast riffs and complex drum arrangements as we have come to associate them with, abetted by vocalist Craig Johnson's aural assault of urgency and intention, this ten-track album of just short of 40 minutes in length, has been one long-awaited - and it doesn't disappoint.
As they hunker down into deep caverns of industrial noise - perhaps most in evidence on opening track 'Missing In Action' with its sharp clanging metal notes sounding like they've been sampled straight from a northern foundry, before broadening out into a frenzied squall of noise and feedback - the tone is distinctly ominous and impenetrable: a maelstrom of post-punk textural angularity. Yet unpeel the layers and 'Dissemble' starts to also reveal another side, one that succumbs to ill-fated emotions and sensibilities, especially on 'Beautiful Place To Die', lending a reflective melancholia.
‘Society’, brimming with driving drums and bass, and razor sharp guitars, comes on like a more feisty Joy Division, while the eerie chords of the Bauhaus-like title track and ‘Immaterial Man’ meld together a patina of experimentalism and high-rock. The near-five minute 'Suicide Saturday' that opens on synth pattern notes that lead to a trenchant, dark vocal set against searing guitars, is a wonderfully constructed track, dipping and diving in its curved alternating tempo, that marks it out as one of the album's highlights.
'Dissemble' is a collective work of shadowy, bleak isolation polished with gritty precision that will linger long in the mind like a spine-chilling Gothic novella.
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