Review Summary: Get pissed and yell a bunch
If you think of it, ten minutes can be a lot of time. First impressions are of course very important for someone to whose trying to win others over, and ten minutes can give that person a lot of time to show what they're made of. So, let's say you've never heard of
Usurp Synapse before and you feel like checking out one of their shorter early releases before moving on to their discography compilation
Disinformation Fix and you decide to check out their
This Endless Breath CDEP.
Like I said, ten minutes is a lot of time for a band to flaunt their style. The guitars on
This Endless Breath is an aural assault of pure hellish noise, dissonant high pitch screeching of the angular variety. The bass, for the most part, works "behind the scenes" musically in that it does not stand out throughout the entire thing, but pop in almost randomly in the middle of all the chaos when every other instrument pause to give more room for the bass to breath out it's deep and rather beautiful tone. The vocals basically imitate the guitars in a way, dirty gunk-ridden screeches of frustration fume from the mouths of two scrawny white guys as the percussion section (in other words, some spazz on a drum set) bash away against the steel trashcan for a snare and violently uses the rest of the kit for sloppy fills.
Clearly inspired equally by noise rock, grindcore, and second-wave emo, this zoo of wild, pissed off nerds utilize every second to create one hell of a racket that will almost certainly drive you away on first listen.
This Endless Breath is a grower, not a shower. It takes a while to really look past the sloppy and spastic performance and really appreciate how the moody bass-ridden tones on "When Good Pets Go Bad" weave right underneath the insane guitar anarchy freak-outs, or the dreary angst-ridden closing guitar whining on "Don't Be Cruel" that close of with the eerie and regretful closing statements from the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre audio sample that close out the EP.
First impressions are important, and even if it might take a few listens to understand what the band is trying to say and do, it’s still a good thing that the band has managed to catch one’s attention in only ten minutes, and when a band is able to do that, you know you’ve found a pretty cool band.
