TRIGGER CUT - ROGO

 


TRIGGER CUT – ROGO


German noise rock trio Trigger Cut’s second album Rogo, like their debut Buster, invigorates jaded ears with inter-generic layering. Producer Daniel W.'s mix and Carl Saff's mastering accentuates the rhythm-rootical proximity of W.'s bass to Ralph Schaarschmidt’s oxidated guitar textures. Post-punk specters like The Pop Group’s Simon Underwood and Wire’s Graham Lewis haunt this European concoction as much as Americans Steve Albini, East Bay Ray and Moore/Ranaldo inform the guitar stylings. 

Most satisfying of all given potpourri pontification is the album’s dyslocational otherness. The quality conversion isn’t as jarring as that between, say, Warsaw and Joy Division, but there’s definitely a sense of gauge tightening in the Trigger Cut ordnance. The production borrows from the mathemagical schematics of Mike Thorne and Martin Hannett. Air swirls within space/time pockets, but its movement doesn't seem necessarily terrestrial. The stop/start dynamics that drive the songs may have originated with The Pixies or from Twenty Four Hours' stealth hauntological hyperdrive to nowhere, or the live version of ‘Heroin’ from Lou Reed's Rock'n'Roll Animal, or Captain Beefheart's ‘Hot Head’, or Amon Duul II's ‘Soap Shop Rock’ or Henry Flynt and the Insurrection's psychobilly ramble tambles (or the contemporary variations on same by Tonstartssbandht.) Stooges' ‘Death Trip’ begotten by The Wiggin Sisters who were begotten by Mr and Mrs Wiggin …  (And so on and so on. Sniff.)

‘Solid State’ starts with compressed rhythm PIP that evokes The Fall’s ‘Ten Houses of Eve'. ‘Coffin Digger’ falls apart at the end like Pere Ubu at their most deliquescent. ‘Transmitter’ is almost early U2-like at times, or is it more Banshees? I can guess which one the band would prefer to be compared to. Huh! Amirite? Amyl nitrate?

‘Oxcart’ is Birthday Party meets Pixies and ‘Hooray Hooray’ is Slint/Polvo angle jangle school with David Thomas’ headmaster hyper-asphyxiating his student address. 'Fireworks' and ‘Nutcracker’ are welcome reiterations of the 5/4(?) waltz-step of ‘Pony’ from Buster. Very doe-see-doe Doremi (Hawkwind ref). Don't mind me. 

Like the pandemic whose influence seeps into this music's neurotic constraint, the will to power at the heart of Teutonic culture is everyone’s to share. The nation’s finest – Bach, Wagner, Stockhausen, Can … - were/are global/cosmic in ambition. If art isn’t the expression for the entropic end of the sex-death drive, then what is in the post-truth age? Its epicentre is anywhere and nowhere under the benevolent aegis of surveillance capitalism (all margarine Macarena praise to they/it).

(C)Copyright Jon Kromka 2021

https://triggercut1.bandcamp.com/releases

 

 

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