Beastland
Beastland draws its weight from machines Tristan Shone built himself. As Author & Punisher, he makes industrial music in which distorted sounds take the place of riffs. Low frequencies press hard, voices seem trapped between layers and the rhythms remain firmly present. Yet there is more melody behind that attack than the first impression suggests.
Pharmacide raises the tension gradually. Separate elements grow into an increasingly dense sound, with a simple pattern providing a foundation. The song does not need constant changes in structure to hit harder. Changing textures give the same movement a different weight.
This approach works especially well in the middle of the album. The Speaker is Systematically Blown turns towards a more melodic direction later on without losing its force. Nazarene then builds a strong contrast between a crawling verse and a much larger chorus. These remain clear songs despite the distortion. Their recognisable shapes make the heavy sound more convincing.
The closing title track also finds an appealing line in the combination of bass and rhythm. The singing stays partly hidden behind the noise, but the melody has not disappeared. The music asks you to keep listening through its dense surface rather than expecting everything to arrive clearly at once.
That also exposes a limitation. The rhythmic patterns sometimes change little, making different passages sound more alike than necessary. The hard, full presentation increases that uniformity in places. Even so, Shone achieves plenty through restricted means. Beastland becomes most appealing when melodies push forward against the distortion. The result is more than a collection of unusual devices to look at. This is a record whose distinctive sound also supports strong compositions.
