Merely 33 minutes. I think even the first couple of Beatles albums were longer. But that's all Disco Inferno needed.
In some respects this is an excuse to talk about the brilliant string of EPs the band put out, five in all, each radically different from the other and each laden with amazing joys. When that gets put out as an official collection, man oh man. If it ever does (and if it doesn't, well, now that I do have my own CD burner, you can still arrange to get one, shall we say). The sheer level of kicking against any number of limitations on what you could do with 'rock,' with technology, with what it means to push and push and push again, to not be afraid of what you can find yourself coming up with, still leaves me quietly astounded.
But no less so than on this record. Whether it's the watersounds on "In Sharky Water" leading to the drowsy swing of the band followed by the most abstract aggression anyone had ever come up with since Wire on 154, about the only obvious comparison point for what Disco Inferno were trying to do, or the camera clicks firing off into oblivion on "Starbound: All Burnt Out & Nowhere To Go" as a squiggly "everybody everybody" chant loops on and on while deliberate guitar pluckings pick out a slight way amidst the melange, that element of post-punk romance via Joy Division and Duritti Column always in the band, musically Disco Inferno looks upon the world and said, "We shall use it." Hooking up their instruments to MIDI computers and playing samples via guitar riffs; what must live gigs have been like?
Ian Crause throughout isn't a Jeremiah or any sort of prophet per se as he sings or recites, but you get scraps of lyrical meaning, groundings, talk of 'military targets' and life in 1993, the year before the album's release. Distorted and fragmented on "New Clothes for the New World," playing against the ragged church bell samples and the jaunty whistle from nowhere, he projects the electronic paranoia which Radiohead polished up very well for OK Computer, but he's all the much more intense, crackling with a nervous energy and lingering horror for what will be just around the corner. Which isn't to say that he can't be plaintive, considering, like on "Next Year," an odd voice of hope amidst wheezing, clattering sounds and crunch.
Guitar grind plays amidst the trebly chaos of keyboards, cars, glass shards, planes, whatever it is that makes up "A Crash at Every Speed," Crause lost somewhere in there, then "Even the Sea Sides Against Us" turns to the profoundly, coldly, electrically beautiful, soft strum-like sounds, high twinkles, an unexpected balm even as Crause pitilessly notes "You don't expect to be seen, you don't expect to be heard." "A Whole Wide World Ahead" conjures up the acoustic guitar/rain combination in newer, stranger ways, odd unexpected rhythms, Crause noting "There's not enough shelter from all the madness around" as the melancholy flow gets more desperate and lost.
Then "Footprints in Snow" sparkles and twinkles, a sudden nostalgic bit of hope, and all is suddenly, oddly, finally well, maybe, "free from the jackboot of history." And then the tape of a landlady telling the band to turn it down plays, and it all ends. Perhaps the world really didn't deserve them.