something to feel inside, I don’t know why
Chrome: Half Machine Lip Moves/Alien Soundtracks
The allure of Chrome is somewhat hard to explain. They are noisy, but not just noisy, also demented and atonal. Take “Zombie Warfare (Can’t Let You Down)” for instance. It’s going along with a lo-fi nasty guitar part, then all of a sudden breaks into an ear-shredding scratch down the strings, then locks into a series of descending harsh guitar notes, then hits a wall and gets lower, grimier, with the vocals incoherent in the background, the percussion clanking like old pipes, the whole affair sounding like it was likely recorded in a sewer. This is one of their best damn songs.
There isn’t really a name for what Chrome did. I suppose it falls into the whole post-punk moment, and it brings together lo-fi aesthetic and punk attitude with psychedelic and space rock with a lot of noise experimentation and lyrics about aliens and zombies. Think Roky Erickson backed by early-period Sonic Youth, recorded in a crumbling warehouse with antiquated equipment in disrepair, but ten times as cool. It is otherworldly, punk rock re-imagined by alien life forms.
The set opens with “TV as Eyes” and one bestial scrawl of the instruments then the drums kick in and it takes some vague shadowy form, the tapes wrecked and blurry, someone singing ‘I don’t know why’ and after a minute it just breaks up into samples of the nightly news, heavy doom synthesizer, and nasty fragments of guitar feedback right up until the wicked “Zombie Warfare (Can’t Let You Down)” pours on in. I can’t make out much of “March of the Chrome Police” but I’m fairly certain one of the lines is ‘We’ll shit on your town,’ and I cannot help but believe them. Nor can I figure what is being whispered on “You’ve Been Duplicated” but it certainly sounds sinister, and the drums are mountainous. The album is full of moments where everything just throttles forward insanely or jerks to a stop and heads in a whole new and fascinating direction. Sometimes it will reestablish the earlier song in such an alien way that you just get a sense of déjà vu. “Zero Time” feels like each person in the band is working on a different song, or perhaps just testing their instruments while someone’s shouting nonsense. Awesome. “Creature Eternal” has a startling, vivid analog synthesizer sound at its center while the guitar and vocals satellite around it. The album ends, aptly enough, with “Critical Mass” just big and lumbering.
Alien Soundtracks is comparatively a clear and rational album. Not that it is either clear or rational, but by comparison it seems somewhat sane. The vocal style recalls music more than animals or machines, the guitars scratch and buzz but don’t sound quite so apocalyptic and the drums have a satisfying thwack to them rather than that unsettling dull thud they have on Half Machine Lip Moves. So, necessarily, it’s not quite as good, although it is damned close, and a brilliant pairing because they are two halves of the same rotten, demented zombie brain. There’s kind of a more cohesive effort to drive forward in these songs, and you can make out a lot of the words. They have more of a super fucked up garage-psych air to them, although there are also moments like “All Data Lost” where the sound is all warped and the singing is reduced to disconsolate moaning until the music settles into a vibrant hum. “Nova Feedback” is a dark, droning piece with the drums, bass and electronic effects providing the atmosphere and the guitar picking and humming beautifully over it. “Slip It to the Android” is even, dare I say it, funky, and the guitars being bowed gives it a feel like a hoedown. “Magnetic Dwarf Reptile” is bleary and massive.
Chrome is still an unparalleled lunatic breakdown set to (damaged, shredded) tape and these two albums find them at their peak.
****1/2
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