Review Summary: Combating anxiety with righteous noise, Will Kraus lays on the static and drums into oblivion.
Will Kraus's music is hardly at the impenetrable extremes of loud noise rock, but for his experimental music-as-therapy, some kind of racket is in order.
Kraus is a New York-based noise artist who goes to bat against his demons with a speaker-fraying wall of sound, shoegazey vocals and rapid-fire drumming. Kraus is not to be confused with the New Zealand band of the same name (whose music, for added confusion, can also be classified as noise rock). Last year,
this Kraus was profiled as a rising noise rock talent in an interview with Pitchfork, in which he described his music as a reaction to runaway anxiety and
End Tomorrow as designed for "when you’re thinking too much or you’re in a stressful situation, to just forcibly batter it out."
True to his word,
End Tomorrow feels like an anxiety detox. Kraus's maniacal drumming drives most of the action. It truly sounds as if Kraus can't physically drum fast enough to release all his energy or pulverize all of the pent-up frustration. His vocals aspire to soar, but they are submerged in the sonic chaos of its surroundings, which feels like a particularly apt metaphor for the emotional motivations behind his music.
Despite its noisy eagerness,
End Tomorrow rarely feels overwhelming, pacing between more triumphant rock-like songs and hypnotic electronics (only one track on the half-hour record surpasses three minutes). Tracks like "Owon" and "More Death" show Kraus wielding fraying electronics with surprising control and warmth. "Says," on the other hand, sounds like actual technological self-destruction; the sounds of a computer dying, but with a sense of musical timing in its last gasps of static. Closer "Help Me" hints at a broader palette of sounds (I hear birds!), with what sounds like a pitched-up vocal looped over a swirling drone. What the album may lack in diversity is countered with efficiency in time and patience.
"Pitch ***er" is the centerpiece of the album and the ultimate distillation of its ideas. Propulsive drumming launches the song into an altered state and Kraus's singing, reaching the furthest up from its depths, is at its most evocative. It feels like the closest we get on
End Tomorrow to true revelation. Be warned: You WILL be tempted to turn up your headphones to not-recommended levels.
Kraus's instinct to "batter out" the unrest of a nervous mind makes for an album bracing in its physicality. But even at its most opaque and indecipherable,
End Tomorrow wants to uplift.
