Review Summary: Merz, where you going?
Damn, this sounded way better at 5 AM, the first skipping little peckpeckpeckpeck at my slumber-fuzzed shit-for-brains mode of being before the coffee’s hit and before any fucking thing in the world makes sense beyond a fuzzy mash of scunged together sensory input, my conscious experience a noose of threads glued together with the shit that collects under the refrigerator, hair and grease and gunge and lost toys and toy parts, yes, this hit better in that span of an hour, before my brain unglued itself enough to do the work of sorting anything into anything resembling anything. If that’s read as a testimonial to this thing’s strength as a noise album, fair play, it’s noisy, yes, not as chaotic, not as punishing, not as ordered, not as cathartic, not as varied, not as rhythmic, not as spontaneous, not as composed, not as hallucinatory, not as violent, not as soothing, not as confrontational, not as hypnotic, not as perverse, not as sterile as some of the other works by Merzbow that I have been exposed to but god damn if it isn’t a deeper listening experience than Pulse Demon, which should be absolutely no one’s first exposure to noise. This is no auditory castration or Giles Corey pressing or anything, in fact sitting at my kitchen table at 5 in the morning this mostly came across as a quite pleasantly ordered little piece of limited textures evolving and kicking and sputtering here and there with little bits of rhythm and wailing feedback and shuffling idiot noises and caressing little harmonized drones of piercing tones over vintage spaceship noises. It didn’t hit nearly as good on my afternoon commute, in fact seemed incredibly silly to be sitting on the highway in 25 MPH traffic while the sun was shining and this idiot thing was blaring at me the whole way so I switched up to AMBER BY 311 RADIO ON PANDORA. Context isn’t everything, but it contributes.
Now, in a more tranquil setting and lucid frame of mind this strikes me at a midpoint between the hazy braindead wash that it was on my hazy braindead commute and the giggling little sputtering kicks at my frayed nerve endings drawn across a spasmic little drop out of time that was my initial listen. There’s a very good deal here that Merzbow is doing great at. Regardless of whether you think he’s the most overrated washed up hack in the noise scene or if you think he’s a brilliant artist merely in need of some restraint when it comes to deciding which experiments need to be put to stud and which should be spayed before they can proliferate, you can’t argue that the man doesn’t know his craft. But boy howdy if he doesn’t take a good idea and plow it into the ground before moving on to the next one on this. When I said in my previous paragraph that this was not as much of so many various adjectives that have described other Merzbow albums it really does seem like Merz has found himself unable to draw this into anything resembling a direction. The thing meanders. It hems. It haws. It takes a noise a texture or a rhythm and it just goes with it and goes with it until the patience is worn thin. It’s not steady enough to be hypnotic. It’s not chaotic enough to be arresting. It just keeps inciting your goodwill with something that represents a immediate visceral blow somewhere behind your eyes and then just doing the same thing until it means very little.
Give any true artist an excuse to make the title of an album a fucking cat pun and they will absolutely do so and major slaps on the back and tugs on the hog of anyone with the gall to do it. When Moses descended Sinai with the tablets bearing the eternal Law of Yahweh, the fact that they did not contain a single cat pun was taken as proof by the Manicheans of the indefensibility of the Abrahamic faiths (Denison, et. al, 2005). My highschool English teacher once said, “a paragraph needs at least 4 sentences, and revolving your noise album around cat photos and cat puns is a justifiable example of the concept of art for art’s sake”. Well, hats off to you Mrs. Hahn.
Merzbow needs no introduction at this point. If this is your first exposure to his music, it’s not the worst place you could start. If this is your first exposure to noise, I beg you, with tears in my eyes, to stop this and pick up Volatile by Pedestrian Deposit. If you know, you know. This is Merzbow, as brilliant and irritating as ever, somehow less than the sum of its parts, but some parts that really know how to worm their ways in between your wee little synapses. This is neither Merzbow at his most playful or his most sadistic. Really this isn't Merzbow at his most anything. But for what it is, there's enough to grab onto that I may revisit it from time to time. But it’s always going to be with the knowledge that, as many times as I find something delightfully stabbing me in my eardrum, it’s just as likely that it will stay there beyond its welcome.
