In Vital Weekly 1385, I reviewed the previous album by Peace & Love, a noise improvisation band consisting of Jay Jolly (drums) and Slater Clampitt (voice & electronics). At that moment, the style of noise they made was relatively new to me, and 13 months later, there was this one, “New American Extremist”. I would lie if I said I played that previous one each week. With my job as a reviewer, making music myself and having an elaborate collection I haven’t played since. At first, I thought it was the same album because the layout, graphics, fonts and everything are very in sync with each other and only the words Nihilist and Extremist are (very) different.
“New American Extremist” counts 12 tracks with a total playtime of 33 minutes. The shortest one is the opening “Rejecting Guitars” of 25 seconds. But those are some intrusive seconds to open an album. The longest track is “Dissolving The Nuclear Family”, with a starring role for Slater’s vocals, which is 5 seconds short of 5 minutes. The music on the album is made of drums and noise, with the noise and vocals pushing boundaries and the improv drums as a layer in all the tracks. And yes, improv is less ‘my thing’ because of my background. My mind sees drums as a constant pattern – preferably with some complexity- so there is no four-to-the-floor silliness. And I do miss a bit of that stability. Which doesn’t make it wrong; it’s just far away from my comfort zone.
The titles are filled with sexual connotations like “Return The Womb Tenant”, “Cock Experience”, “More Than Sex” and “Fuck You” (in four parts). Maybe it’s part of the extremist theme, but I don’t think these tracks need the sexual innuendo to be considered extreme. The music itself has all the extremity it can handle to be considered an extremist.
It’s hard (no pun intended) to mention a favourite track, but if I had to choose, it would be the “Fuck You” quadrilogy; The four tracks flow into each other, and the resulting 12 minutes have a bit of that continuous flow. I was looking for.
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