Review Summary: Now stick the RJ11 connector up my ass
You know those mouthbreathers that don’t like metal? The ones that decry it as ‘just noise’, call anything with harsh vocals ‘screamo’ and then follow that up with their best retches and air guitar attempts? Well, in the case of a band like Frontierer, I do kinda, y’know,
get it.
The musical equivalent of receiving backshots from a dial-up modem whilst it erratically spanks you with a downtuned guitar, Frontierer’s release history is a gallery of sharp sounds with extremely jagged edges, often intricately arranged but always white-hot with rage. Unsurprisingly,
The Skull Burned… is a lean, mean and uncompromising 12 minute monster from the Scottish-American noise merchants, but it also manages to employ a surprisingly (and unusually) deft sense of order amidst its white-knuckle insanity.
The twisted made-in-a-bedroom aesthetic that has remained consistent since 2013’s
The Collapse is still a constant central device; nasty, dissonant guitar passages persistently interrupted by jarring error messages. The EP feels like a maturation from the band’s most recent full-length
Oxidized, however, primarily in the sense of structure both on individual songs, and in the flow of the release as a jigger-shot brief yet multi-layered experience.
The tracklist-sentence motif betrays a sense of cohesion at odds with the wanton carnage of the music. The sludgy hardcore framework of the opening track is a warm-up exercise for the mayhem the record will mercilessly descend into, with the bludgeoning onslaught of full-auto guitar chunders and throat-shredding vocals refusing to relent even for a second. Lyrics occasionally skew a shade oblique but are always savagely evocative, and as burningly intense as their abrasive delivery.
The well-established violence of Frontierer’s sound finds itself comfortably enshrined on a release of rapid dexterity, integrating individual movements within songs that are no less breakneck than before, but operate with a more controlled command of the distinct style. It may be short, but it’s still eye-watering and the expected dissonance sits astride some seriously stanky grooves, be they in the form of the full throttle chugga-chugga or the gleefully atypical breakdowns Frontierer love to code with malfunctioning motherboard SFX.
I’ll be one of the first to admit that the outfit’s brazenly unhinged style hasn’t always landed, and in spite of some past moments that I might begrudgingly describe as ‘genius’ after a few cold ones, they have had their fair share of throwaway cuts. Nonetheless, if
The Skull Burned… is any indication of the future, fans of the guitar-meets-soundboard pigeonhole could have some seriously teeth-chattering treats lined up. Until then, drink deep from this well and savour it, because it’s black as tar, glitchy as your granny’s computer and filthy as f*ck.
