D’you like horrible noise? Crashing, squalling, atonal, grating, grinding, somewhat lacking in melody; an utterly unholy din? If not, you probably won’t like Traps, heartyeah’s debut album, and you might wanna stop reading now and get on with the washing up, or something.
Still here? Then you’re presumably open to being convinced that this is the right kind of nasty din and that it’d get past your most-stringent Howling Racket Quality Control screening system. You are? Marvellous.
Right then. I think the most economical way of describing this to you is the term Fisher Price Hardcore. There’s a kind of flailing, righteous amateurism; a ‘throw everything in the music shop at the wall-of-sound and see what sticks’ approach which gives this album the air of a 35-minute-long, much-stretched-out and very resourceful explosion. A lot of the sounds used are technically kinda comical, and wouldn’t be out of place in a Terribly Funny Comedy Song – but in this charged, utterly unpolished setting they get warped and bent into the service of heartyeah’s misanthropic air, and come across as all twisted and bizarre. It’s very compressed, straining noise, lots of thwarted energy and incongruous notes, and all with an air about it of the kind of inventiveness born of not quite having exactly the right equipment, knowing you wouldn’t know what to do with it even if you did – and thoroughly believing that such trivial technical points don’t matter at all, because good noise will always find a way. Challenging listening, but well worth the effort.
-
8's Score