Review Summary: industrial terror made fun and easy
To be completely forward, I was less than impressed with Sightless Pit’s debut. My initial excitement about a collaboration between three of the most prominent members of today’s avant-artsy-fucked-up scene was quickly doused by an album that felt clunky, half-baked and impotent, an album that managed to neuter everything that made both Kristin Hayter and Lee Buford so interesting while awkwardly stapling together a vibe that couldn’t figure out if it was serious or not. And while Lockstep Bloodwar isn’t doing anything substantially different from that previous effort, it manages to at least cohere its industrial death-trap aesthetic at least somewhat more smoothly than last time while making it a little more apparent that the duo of Walker and Lee Buford are, first and foremost, if not entirely, having fun on this record.
The first thing of note about this album is the wild variety of features, as the hole left by Kristin Hayter's absence is filled by a wide and unlikely selection of who’s who and who’s new of underground music make an appearance, from Boredoms’ YoshimiO and Frukwan of Gravediggaz to relative newcomers Lane Shi Otayonii and Crownovhornz. The Crownovhornz feature on Shiv hearkens heavily to Techno Animal at their absolute best, and many of the industrial beats peppering the album are reminiscent of a time when this kind of thing could be played more straight and less tongue in cheek. The bizarro smooth jazz saxophone wailing under YoshimiO’s howling scream in Calcified Glass supported by a skittering, trap-influenced beat and Buford’s fuzzed out industrial pulse are a prime example of the playful experimentation on this album, only cemented by a delightfully crass verse from Gangsta Boo.
So if it’s not meant to be taken very seriously, that doesn’t mean that it can’t at least be fun. In any case, just looking at the above list of features should be a clear indicator that Sightless Pit are engaging with this material at least somewhat playfully. The rap features, the rudimentary hip-hop beats, the sax solo, the autotune on False Epiphany, it all makes it pretty clear that even if all the individual elements of Lockstep Bloodwar are being played straight, it’s in bringing them together that we get to see how much of the joy of sheer novelty this actually has the potential to produce. We all know what these luminaries of their respective scenes are capable of, the genuine blackness of the human soul that they are able to convey, and if they want to lean more heavily into their frankenstein’s monster of genre tropes and have fun doing it, who am I to deny them that?
But the fact that Lockstep Bloodwar may be just a relatively lighthearted cutting loose for Walker and company doesn’t obscure the fact that it ultimately comes across as an amusing, yet disjointed effort that gathers together a plethora of fun ideas and guest artists and doesn’t do much to mold those elements into a coherent whole. It's not a pisstake, but nor is it something that anyone's pouring their heart into. Buford’s rudimentary trap beats rarely, if ever, mesh well with Walker’s throbbing industrial terrorscapes, and the effect, at its very worst, is more that of some rando who thought it would be funny to do a trap remix of Leichenschrei and post it on youtube. Not to say the effect never in fact meshes or coheres: Low Orbit takes a step back from all the hi-hat tippity-tap and makes its percussive backbone a pulsing industrial beat that actually complements the fuzzed out shuffle of the background music. But with this and other examples, one gets the sense that if Sightless Pit had perhaps put just a little more effort into meshing their disparate influences, they might have come up with something of a little more substance.
So maybe my initial problem with Sightless Pit was more than just one of expectations. But for what it ends up being, it’s a surprisingly fun plunge into all of Buford and Walker’s black congealing of industrial despair tempered with a novel severed-tongue-in-cheek sensibility that, if nothing else, manages to stand on its own as a relatively unique work. So between that and the fact that Lockstep Bloodwar is quite the ride in its own right, its flaws are easy to forgive.
