You know that deeply hollow feeling after a particularly intense session of sex that starts at the base of your abdomen and slowly envelopes your entire being till the only thing left to do is quietly go off to sleep while hoping you don’t have to bother with pillow talk? Well, the new Noism is something of a similar experience without the benefit of having had sex prior to the listening of ±.

Noism is a cyber grind duo from Japan that’s been around since 1999 and ± is a re-issue of the band’s work from Crucial Blast. The music on offer is basically drum patterns cut up and looped and spliced back together with no sense of timing, groove or sanity. On top of this is some of the most ridiculously spastic guitar playing I’ve ever heard and that’s it. This is probably the noisiest album of the year and I don’t mean that in a good way. Thankfully there are no vocals to deal with here but unfortunately there are no songs either. There are 12 short pieces of noise that just fuse together to form an incredibly irritating sound scape of scatter shot drums and spastic guitar riffs.

I don’t know who this sort of noise appeals to and at the end of the day it seems like the music on offer is simply chaotic for the sake of being chaotic. There is absolutely no intelligence to be found in the band’s song craft and you can even argue that there is no song craft here. Just a bunch of noises put together to piss people off.

I’d recommend listening to this album if you get off on that deeply hollow feeling I was talking about earlier. Or maybe, if you have 21 minutes of your life that you just want to waste. Otherwise, I’d recommend staying away from ± like it was plague itself.



Label - Crucial Blast
Year of Release - 2008