The feeling of two hands strangling you and a third hand hitting you across the back of the head with a 2×4 instantly comes to mind when listening to Mutation’s Error 500 for the first time. Then confussion kicks in. What the hell is this unbelievably irresistible extreme racket? Straight up rock meshes into thrash while a Blondieesque female vocal chants. The moods shift all over the shop catering for nearly every style of music you could imagine. Particularly if you can only imagine heavy music.
Mutation is something of a super group featuring members of Napalm Death, The Wildhearts, Mark E. Smith from The Fall, and lastly legendary Japanese noise servant Merzbow(who has worked extensively with Boris in recent times). The album has been called ” an album that couldn’t and shouldn’t be made” But here it is, and despite Mutation being on Mike Patton‘s label, it doesn’t prevent them from throwing in a series of Pattonesque schizophrenic outbursts and time changes that throw you off kilter.
But there is enough here to tempt any person who is musically curious. The song Mutations heads off on a strange Devo course, while Computer, this is not what I…… is a riff fest similar to the late great Texan semi prog guitar centric outfit Galactic Cowboys, but then shifts into a Mr Bungle type coda.
For some it may require a few designated listens. But when you finally get it, it won’t leave you. The last song Benzo Fury is a love song dedicated to the fine family of drugs named Benzodiazepines. After listening to this extreme and noisy album from start to finish, it is quite appropriate that you may need a course of Xanax to come down from the experience.
The highlight though is the brutally beautiful Innocentes in morte. It allows you to drift off into a rocking psychedelic haze with a cool metal groove that verges of fusionesque, before it begins throwing stabs of nuclear psychedleic thrash at you.
Mutation is music that grabs you by the throat. But it also does a whole lot more. If you’re willing to dig beneath the extremity you’ll find complexity and forward thinking approach that can be quite rare in this genre of music. This probably has a lot to do with the participants. If they’re gonna be wrestled out of their day jobs it has to be for a good reason.
Dean Seabrook
