Featuring members including power electronics bête noires John Wiese and Kevin Drumm, since 1999 American noise upstarts Sissy Spacek have melded together the disparate worlds of grindcore and musique concrete to produce an cacophony of industrial landscapes. Sissy Spacek’s fifth studio album French Record opens with Scorpion Whip, a eighties heavy metal hommage deconstructed and defiled underneath layers of lo-fi dense hiss. Sounding much like the amplified destruction of a Napalm Death cassette in a faulty Datsun tape deck, Scorpion Whip sets the tone for the rest of the album by providing a punishing epiphany for one’s inner noisenik and metalhead alike. A series of brief vignettes follow, providing short bursts of harsh noise that although are on the verge of frightening manage to somehow hold themselves together. Tracks like Flood and Really Into The Haters expand upon this format with a detour into electro-acoustic and free jazz soundscapes, melding obliterating sonic frequencies with delicate dynamics and minimalist techniques. A contender for the soundtrack of any future nuclear apocalypse, French Record comes highly recommended for purveyors of aural submission – although possibly less so for Academy Award buffs.
Andrew Tuttle
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