“Wolf at the Door,” the opening track on Disconnected, rises
like a monolith of sound from the ashes and detritus of heavy metal,
industrial and grindcore. This collaboration features the leaders of
two of the heaviest bands ever: Justin K. Broadrick of Jesu and
Godflesh fame, and Aaron Turner of Isis. They are joined by Dave
Cochrane and Diarmuid Dalton on bass and electronics, respectively.
This is music at its most extreme, with a viscera-rattling bottom,
distorted-beyond-recognition vocals, unrelenting drum loops, and
doom-laden electronic buzz signals shuddering like tectonic shifts
across a broken slag heap of guitars. But most amazing about the work
of Greymachine is that it trades in real hooks and
melody—monstrously heavy ones, granted—while splattering
noise across the walls of your brain.
The tracks are long and hypnotic, with the shortest clocking in at 6
1/2 minutes. The longest is the 10-minute epic “Vultures Descend,”
which uses smoldering sheets of guitar and machine-gun bass to imagine
the apocalypse knocking on your front door.
The shuddering, lockstep groove of “Wasted” is mesmerizing
and catchy, and it subtly segues into the full-frontal assault
of “We Are All Fucking Liars.” In the latter, the battery of percussion
and marching low-end bass escort howling guitars into and back from the
abyss; it’s as claustrophobic and dense a piece of music as I have
heard in years.
Greymachine may not be everyone’s cuppa, but for connoisseurs of the
heavy, it is as unrelenting and earth-shaking as the best music of
Chrome, Swans and, for goodness’ sake, Godflesh.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2009.
