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I wonder what the UK audiences will make of this lot when they descend these shores shortly, I’d like to think that their eccentricity will be well founded. The Mass are a quartet based in Oakland, California and when I tell you there’s a track here entitled ‘We enslaved elves to build our death machine’, then you may well be reasonably alerted to the fact that things are not quite right within the Mass ranks and I’m putting that mildly because this debut is scary in the sense that it’s a three pairs of pants jobbie.
Wilfully fraught, unorthodox and uncontrollable, the Mass are adept at creating a calamitous racket, this is rock ‘n’ roll being horse whipped, bludgeoned and thrown through the mincer. Discordant at the very least, ‘City of DIS’ at eight tracks in length is a charmless bastard of a record, one for those who prefer their ears and hi-fi systems running close to the point of melt down. Shellac, Melvins and John Zorn are common denominators in this lot’s lives, brittle and unstable spastic rhythms and riffs taunted by the addition of an equally hostile sounding saxophone (‘Marca dos Invernos’), the Mass play a critically challenging brand of crunching abstract punk that has one foot in the smoke filled jazz clubs while the other is content to kick seven bells out of the competition with its festering mutation of splintered math rock and gruesome grind core, not as demonic as Carcass but instead a slightly more playful Slayer with the dense attrition of early Fugazi.
It’s provides for an unrelenting exhibition of blood curdling mayhem where the rulebook is literally torn up and an anything goes mentality is adopted. The aforementioned ‘We enslaved elves to build our death machine’ is the pinnacle point of the album and masks itself with a sense of devilment, a real burning cauldron of an epic, in essence its King Crimson wanting to be Led Zeppelin with hard core hooks (seriously), a menacingly hell bound doom laden opera of sorts that flickers with the notion of early 70’s progressive rock yet shy’s short of being pompous by continually re-finding the plot just when you think it’s beyond them.
Opening with the rampant no-nonsense of ‘La Porc’, the Mass immediately lay down their credentials, a frenetic neck snapping lesson in stutter core dynamics, even having time to ingest, albeit momentarily, Zeppelin’s ‘Kahmir’ before upending the plot into a violently seismic blaze of hot wired unrest with impishly mooching saxophones aplenty. If that wasn’t enough ‘Trapped under a ice’ ups the ante with a defiantly howling inferno of brazen hardcore. Ultimately ‘City of Dis’ should come stickered with a health warning saying not for the feint hearted or closed minds. Demonising your soul has never sounded so good.
MARK BARTON
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