Opener Africastle is a resolute fortress of avant-garde menace, John Stanier's stereotypically frenetic drums tussling with agitated stabs of guitar and protruding plinks of treble that rifle to the fore. Ebbing and flowing, waxing, waning and culminating in the sound of the contents of the Early Learning Centre malfunctioning in idiosyncratic mellifluousness, it's a startling introduction to the purely instrumental landscape they now predominantly operate within. In fact it's only when veering into the land of the vocal that the Gloss Drop becomes somewhat diluted, the pseudo-industrial popular song structure of My Machines, with Gary Numan on wailing duties, a rollocking if somehow wrong stampede through globules of off-kilter disconcertion in the form of whirring synths and vacuous lyricisms. Sweetie & Shag meanwhile sees the experimental collective rope in Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino for a fairly rudimentary romp through routine power chord progression that sounds distinctly like regression to the flickering schizophrenia of Mirrored. Said LP is of course still veritably staggering, yet the NYC outfit have eradicably altered coordinates, subsequently rendering the track somewhat incongruous amidst the fluid textures and underlying crunch to much of the record. Only the oneiric shrieks of Yamantaka Eye on closer Sundome, the hallucinatory, figurative glacier cherry on Gloss Drop really whip up any sort of coherence as far as guests go. For when the trio of Stanier, Ian Williams and Dave Konopka fly solo, the results are devastating: from ominous organs and disquieted hunks of agitated six string oomph, layers of guitar bumbling and bundling over one another (Futura) to elastane undulation (Wall Street), they've prescribed a fascinating recipe for a post-Braxton, post-genre fate. Toddler sounds like Koji Kondo soundtracking Lost in Translation were the depression fest set in a peachy Utopia in place of emotive unrequitedness atop metropolis backdrop, whilst the hanging guitars of White Electric bottom out in unadulterated brilliance. Keeping things quirky, if the future's to remain honeyed it ought to remain instrumental, sprinkled only with surreality and garnished with as many guitars as fathomable.
