Black Dice treats electronica like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
treats the blues: The audacious Brooklyn trio takes a big bite of
musical matter and chews it up, reducing it to its basic building
blocks, and then aggressively spits it back at listeners. This process
results in chaotic sound collages, an assaultive variation on IDM that
is both intellectually engaging and physiologically enervating.
Black Dice have been celebrated as sonic pioneers and dismissed as
bellicose and annoying. Either way, this band challenges and subverts
what is generally considered music, not unlike similar artists such as
Squarepusher, Wolf Eyes, Fuck Buttons and Melt-Banana.
With that established, Repo is perhaps their most musical
album yet. Still, the abstract song constructions are completely open
to interpretation. The leadoff track, “Nite Creme,” for instance, with
its electronic snarls and gulps, and a beat that vacillates between
rigid and rubbery, could be the rutting call of a prehistoric mammal.
Or it could be simply be a diverting amalgam of noise.
Many of the tunes are marked by window-rattling bass, garbled vocals
and waves of aggressive distortion, but each has unique melodic
elements, such as the half-intelligible Asian sounds embedded in “Lazy
TV,” the dripping bleeps of the strangely calming “Vegetable” and the
spooky backwards vocals and grinding-metal guitar on “Chicken Shit.”
Disturbing? Yes, but entertainingly so.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2009.