Sunday, February 8, 2009

Burning Star Core & Lambsbread - Live In St. Louis

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Maim & Disfigure, CD-R
2006, 320 kbps, 44MB

It's pretty quick - 2 tracks, 22 minutes - but feels longer in all the right ways. The first track is a 16-minute piece that arises slowly, with Yeh sawing some high violin tones while the Lambsbread stable add squalling feedback, lonely bass plucks, and achingly deadened guitar strokes. Things slowly ascend from there, with washing drums injected eventually, and a blistering battle of sharp guitar jangles and hole-tearing violin that often sounds like a misty bootleg of the V.U. playing a stretched-out version of "European Son." I dig how this track's pulse is unchartable yet undeniable - it seems to incrementally speed up, yet it never really gets "fast" - just increasingly urgent and thick, like a snowball rolling so far down a mountain it eventually swallows it. Whatever it's doing, it's definitely one of the best long group improv tracks I've heard all year, in a league with the Text of Light box and that insanely great Pengo disc from a few weeks back.

Since that track is 3/4ths of the disc, it would be theivery to post it, so instead here's the brief epilogue - a louder, more hectic rip through puncturing violin rage, overloading guitar blasts, and devastating drum anarchy. There's so much happening on this track that the digital audio space can't quite handle it, which only adds to the hypnotic sheen, vaguely like an iced-over pond under which the fish are frantically swimming for some way out. It all adds up to one of those somewhat rare times where two great bands can combine into something even greater.
- Noiseweek


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