Exocet - Consequences

Take a stick of chalk, snap it in two, grind the pieces against one another until they're a fine powder. Next, throw it up in the air, now walk through it. Feel the finite particles coat your skin and creep down your throat with a burning urgency. Get in your cart and enter the mines, you're listening to the latest album from Klima's vicious project Exocet. Observe the rotted out timbers propping up sagging formations of rock blasted out with crude brutality, you'll see jackhammers of electronic teeth gnawing at them, further refining their composition while taking chunks out of the support beams. Better hope you can eject quickly and run when the cave in comes, because with work like this slashing and burning through the scenery it won't be long in arriving. These beats are like angular, unsympathetic steel girders crashing down all around; sometimes they clip you and rip out a bit of flesh. The price one pays, I suppose. Caustic industrial processing is going on here, each song (if you can call them that) is anchored by distortion and forged out of providence's darker urges.

We have our respites between tracks, a little chance to recover but it never lasts long. The sequencing Exocet utilize to give further definition to their material is very primal, cast down into a bellow of white hot molten alchemy. Best mind your surroundings, these sparks will burn your flesh and give it the same charred consistency of the work I'm hearing on 'Consequences'. It's a real treat to listen to this kind of uncompromisingly violent execution, I'll tell you. No sweetly arranged strings, no sugary chorus in sight. Just glowering vengeance, scorched Earth and supremely exquisite angst. I'd always wanted to hear Klima on his own, don't know what took me so long. Yeah yeah he's been on record with Architect but left to his own devices he pumps out the beats and then chains them to nightmares of dissonance. To investigate this record is to come away with a sense of exertion.

Muscles straining under duress, the gleam of sweat exuding from your pores. Exocet. Just the name itself conjures up a host of images, mainly ones concerned with sterile efficiency. We'll skip the obvious meaning of the name, most of you can work it out. Even with all these variables in diametric opposition to one another, you can move to this album, there's some highly evolved groove going on here. This band's work will pierce your psyche, much as their mission statement describes. You don't listen to Exocet to escape life, you listen to Exocet and become wounded. There's no other way to look at what's going on here, 'Consequences' simply has too many sharp edges to avoid injury. Perhaps there will be a softening of Klima's style given time (this is album three) but somehow I think he'd just use any kind of that to find new ways of pulling the rope tighter. This guy isn't into flowers and lovelorn meadows, he's the fellow you'd find standing outside a factory complaining that it isn't acrid enough... he'd like some more soot, please.

Where were acts like this in the 90s when geek-sponsored power noise was running amok, ruining numerous club nights I went to. No matter, I now have another record to play alongside Decree's latest, a cordially vindictive postcard from the slag heap. It's disconcerting how each time I play this, it sounds better than before, as though it is developing before my very eyes. How much longer until it develops language skills, I wonder. Feb 12 2012