Off the bat this band from Sydney hits like an industrial strength Jesus Lizard, and by industrial I mean Ministry infused. bands like Battilus, who are leaving the the myspace cyber dreads at home and bring back industrial by way of sludge are in the same sub division as these guys. Though this bands from the first song needs a luittle help with dynamics and song writing as they tend to take one riff and drone on that . The bass line to "Whores Rule" help solve this problem to some extent as they swerve off from the mechanical punishment to serve up some Amp Rep still abrasion.
When they gather the momentum they can distract you from the simplistic compositional structures. The staccato thumping of "Usefulness" is pretty useful to create a very Godflesh vibe, which is the influence that is marrying sludge to industrial. They slow things down for the intro to " gifted children" then bring it back up into a frantic tension, that is more post-punk in feel. The song sounds like it could have built into more of an explosion but halts in its track rather jarringly.
The noisy post-punk feeling continues on "blue blood" the distorted vocals sit back into the fuzzy density of the mix.They hit you with some really thick heavy riffage in the last couple of minutes. The vocals keep a calm monotone for most of the album resisting the urge to scream in order to match the violence stirred around them. "Black Blood" is understandably more abrasive. It begins with scraping noise and remains just an interlude. "December clone " starts off as a clone of another riff they used and goes into a drunken jazz like passage. It coils around it self in a more militant manner, to hammer at you like the Jesus Lizard or even the Butthole Surfers.
The album closes out with "invitation" it opens with a self indulgent laze of ambient noise and various forms of feedback. At the two minute mark the album most industrial beat comes in. This drone on for another two minutes , not what you want to listen to if you are hung over. The more subdued but tense clean guitar riff comes in with a Killing Joke like vocal chant over the top of it all. The guitar playing here gets very Nine Inch Nails, think more With Teeth, than Downward Spiral, more jangle than metal, until it explodes into a vomitous noise, that pounds at you like older Swans. I will give this album an 8.5, it shows a lot of potential that needs to be realized in more dynamic songwriting, but I like where these guys are coming from and fans of industrial who are looking for where the genre is changing with the times need to be aware of this trend.
Narrow Lands new album is definitely worth a spin
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