Review Summary: "Its like a soundtrack of two snails fucking" - Dylan Carlson
To be honest I didn’t care much for
Absolutego the first time I listened to it, or the second, or the third… But there was something very intriguing about it that made me come back again and again. There is something very magnetic about this album.
This epic starts of with Takashi turning on his amp to a wall of feedback and hitting one note, I believe it’s a c#. But then nothing happens. He just holds that note, he holds it like he just found the golden ticket, and he holds it, and wrangles it for the next three and a half minutes until finally it is over come with feedback and you cant even remember what it sounded like in the beginning. Eventually the fury drops out and he plays the songs main theme, a grindingly slow ascending riff. This keeps building and building, drawing you in getting bigger and bigger.
As the song builds up and Wata lays on her echoing feedback, you can faintly hear Atsuo growling in the background, its all very sinister sounding. Everything keeps intensifying until about 20 minutes into the song you hear the drums kick in, with a few cymbal shimmers and some tom pounding. Finally after the almost half hour of build up Atsuo attacks his drums and things begin with a furious pick-slide.
It sounds like they uncorked a bottle of pure evil. Things finally kick in and I realized all of the buildup was necessary; it was as if they were summoning a monster through this lumbering drone. This beast of a song ebbs and flows back and forward building with intensity as Atsuo lets out blood curdling screams over waves of sound, until the levees break and the band goes into the most strait forward part of the song, a chugging riff that sounds like they are leading you on a march toward your impending doom.
After the death march a multi tracked guitar solo comes in to change the mood a bit. As the solo rages on the bass goes into the original riff of the song and Wata’s playing slowly degenerates into a cacophony of feedback, things have come full circle, and with violent guitar spasms and pounding drums the hideous beast known as
Absolutego starts to recede back to were it came from, and things wrap up with pulsing layers of feedback.
Though I really want to recommend this album to everyone, I can’t. I do have a few gripes with it. The all-around recording quality is sub-par and can be really hard to listen to at first, especially the drums. The drums sound like they were recorded inside a tin can. Also unless you have the full hour and five or so minutes, don’t even bother putting this on, listening to any part of this out of context is just confusing and disappointing, believe me I have tried. There is a second track on here called
Dronevil 2 , it has nothing to do with their other album of the same moniker, its more of an exercise in the art of bass feedback, its good for a listen but really nothing more.
In conclusion I highly recommend
Absolutego. It is one of the finest drone records I have ever heard. It may takes a few listens to really dig into. But be warned it is defiantly not a record to just throw on when people are around, unless you really want to clear the room.
