Anyone with a thing for Sonic Youth or The Telescopes should make a bee-line for One Unique Signal. This belated follow-up to 2005 debut Tribe, Castle And Nation finds the Brentford combo offering up dishloads of noisy drone-rock, the immersive effect of their music accentuated by the kind of production that suggests the whole thing was recorded in some subterranean chamber.
The vocals are murky as hell, rendered in various shades of black, while the triple-guitar attack of Byron Jackson, Nick Keech and James Messenger makes for a clammy wall of distorted sound. A terrific piece of stampeding psych, Luna Attractions is all choppy riffs and raw power, and there’s more than a touch of VU to The Under Side’s howling solo and insistent rumble.
They approximate The Fall’s claustrophobia on the less frenetic Amplitude, and Celebration And Absence sees them head off into real experimentalism.
Repetition is a key feature of what they do. Seed and the closing title track are driven by cyclical riffs and Dan Davis’s terse drumming, their impact made all the more eerie by disembodied shrieks that hint at some secret ritual. Grab your headphones and play this very, very loud.
