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check out a review of the album below
Pulse-Alternative Magazine
2 October at 16:44
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FAMILY OF NOISE-Music Is Just Organised Noise(fon005, 2xCD, 2024)
family of noise
“The family of noise is here to save everybody…” sang Adam Ant on his 1979 song ‘Family Of Noise’ and that premonition came to pass when the band Family Of Noise started jamming together in 1993. Their original incarnation was brief (but busy) and after a lengthy hiatus the band rekindled their fire in 2013. Since then it has been full steam ahead, and whilst the band look to the past for inspiration (Bauhaus, Banshees, Killing Joke et al.) their sights are very much set on the future. However, their latest release, the double disc Music Is Just Organised Noise features tracks from the past three decades, collected, collated and served up for your delectation.
Instrumental music is an anathema to some and a benediction to others. For some a vocalist is a focal point, a totem around which the band swings, for the rest it is an imposition, a warbling that gets in the way of the words. Like many I must admit to being ambivalent; I can see the pros and cons of both, and I enjoy each in equal measure. However, as someone with a fondness for bands such as Deicide and Obituary, an accusation levelled is that people can’t decipher death metal growls and make out the words. Well...just make up your own (and it transpires your lyrics are often better). What death metal shares with instrumental music is that collaborative experience; a band such as Family Of Noise pulls you into their sphere and makes you a cog in their wheel; this is music you engage with, rather than simply receive and it turns out that their instrumental brand of post-punk speaks in a way that vocalised music never could.
Despite having all the song titles presented in lower case, there’s nothing shy or retiring about this collection and opening track ‘before I go’ certainly makes its presence felt. It’s hypnotic, but not in a flowery Derren Brown type of way. It’s more like a bad tab of acid hypnotic with the band creating discombobulating images with the bass knocking on your cranium like an uninvited guest and the guitar contorted into previously unknown shapes. Having said that, it’s all very nice and if my local dealer was selling this kind of stuff, I’d definitely go back for another trip.
There’s something very old school about this set and at first I wondered why, when the running time for each disc is approximately thirty minutes, it was spread over two. Yet, that physical act of changing the disc in your player is akin to flipping over a piece of vinyl; it creates an interval that gives you a chance to digest what you’ve heard and anticipate what’s to come. And after the dark delights found on disc one, the second set serves up a smorgasbord sinister tracks. ‘imperial drag’ is that heavy breather on the other end of the phone whilst ‘set the phasers to stunning’ are the footsteps behind you on a dark night and could easily have come from the pen of Robert Smith. Family Of Noise are a mirror fracturing sound; the loud and quiet juxtaposed and the lithe tethered by the heavy, and while much music today is vacant and vapid, Family Of Noise give us a much needed cerebral fix.
Therefore, it’s with a certain sadness when we reach final song ‘when I’m gone’, but here’s hoping they’ll return very soon.
“...the family of noise are here to save you and me”.
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