Review Summary: a glitch in the matri...
Noer the Boy has a real knack for feeding your ears sounds you've never heard before. Over course of the past few years the Portland, Oregon based experimental electronic producer has put forth some of the most off-kilter and interesting music in the west coast scene with his signature blend of jarring rhythms and curious sound design. You could call him a thinking man’s producer; one whose music posits an intentional challenge to the listener as you joust and tussle with it on the dancefloor. The man has always a knack for crafting monstrous bass music with some of the clankiest and most oddball sound design you’ll ever find, but with his debut LP
Mechanism, we get to see Noer the Boy buckle down and get serious for a full half hour. While the squeaky horns, broken keyboards and rusty bicycle spoke clamorings are still here in full force, the whole thing is enveloped in a rather dark aesthetic that keeps itself connected to an overarching narrative, painting the whole experience in a rather unsettling light.
Blurring the lines between Aphex Twin's maniacal experiments and Lorn's plunges into subsonic bass frequencies,
Mechanism is essentially the sonic equivalent of watching a freight train hauling recalled kids toys careen off its tracks and crash into a wooden fireworks factory. Sure, it's a recipe for disaster, but every minute of the captivating entropy snares the listener in an overwhelming sensual assault. Familiar progressions and melodies are beaten and battered until they're barely recognizable and then deep fried in the boiling remnants of industry standard songwriting. The trap-meets-power-electronics-and-avant-jazz songwriting vivaciously dices the very tenets of anthemic dance music into challenging rhythms, whilst off-kilter movements sound as if they are trying break free from the shackles of their robotic consciousness. An earnest impression of a machine’s struggle to become human is imprinted on the listener here, leaving them to ponder this foreign perspective of a mechanical mind with an existential curiosity. Could artificial intelligence ever truly
feel how an organic lifeform feels when it looks up at the sky in awe? Could it be possible that we ourselves are nothing more than pieces of extraterrestrial technology whose grand design lay beyond our realms of programmed understanding? Indeed,
Mechanism seems to posit a great number of unanswerable questions as it moves like an enigmatic puzzle bouncing off the walls of your speaker’s insides. The whole experience is rather unnerving, and while tracks like “Runnr” and “The Straw” may serve as the album’s answer for dancefloor bangers with their raucous tumult, there remains something completely inhuman about it all.
For all the devilish detail and dizzying discord packed into
Mechanism, it hurtles past you at an alarmingly quick trot that feels a lot shorter than 32 minutes. Perhaps there could have been a couple more fleshed out showstoppers with some extra bells and whistles to stretch this album's wingspan, but it’s hard to complain considering how deep Noer's claws dig into every millisecond of this wild ride. It may be challenging - and at times excruciating - but it’s hard to avoid the impression that this is exactly how Noer the Boy wants it, and in lieu of all the moments that left you begging for a semblance of catchy refuge, it’s hard to help but be completely enthralled by
Mechanism’s cerebral mannerisms.
