REVIEW: Add N to (X), Avant Hard (Mute)
- Niles Baranowski
You may think you've never heard Add N to (X), but if you watch MTV at all, you probably have without realizing it. The band was commissioned to do "show packaging" (those faux-arty station ID's that you see at the top and bottom of every hour) starting in February and if those bleeps that you heard got you curious, Avant Hard will surely hook you in.
One of the most accessible of the "post-rock" bands working today, this British trio mix the correct proportions of minimalism, rhythmic complexity and twistedly kitschy in-jokes into their retro-futuristic base stock. If the sounds remind you somewhat of Kraftwerk (on, say, "Robot New York"), they are compressed into such oddball tempos and time signatures that sounds tend to come out as sudden bursts or in such powerful streams that you feel pushed along by them.
Not as vocoderized or synth-strict as their stellar debut On the Wires of Our Nerves, Avant Hard seems focussed on pushing the band's sense of humor center stage. One song titled "Buckminster Fuller" repeats his name as a sort of mantra over a driving drum beat (courtesy of High Llama Rob Allum) while "Metal Fingers in my Body" repeats its so-naughty-its-harmless title over pummeling Trans Am-esque guitar rock textures (allegedly the video for this single is an animated porn film), probably the band's least synthetic moment. Odder still, each member gets an eponymous song. Barry Smith's "Barry 7's Contraption" sounds like a traffic jam of clown cars being pulled forward on an ever accelerating conveyer belt while Steve Claydon's "Steve's Going to Teach Himself Who's Boss" uses Ian Curtis-damaged vocal samples as a sort of meaningless scat speech over ground zero minimalism. Then you've got Anne Shenton and "Anne's Eveready Equestrian" which sounds like a horse protesting as it's driven off a stormy cliff. The meaning of this is clear: Barry's the goofy one, Steve's the dark one and Anne...loves horses, I guess.
While all this levity makes for some nice dance music (check out the jumpy "Skills"), the band works best with long drawn-out pieces that allow emotion to build as they manage to do on the second half of the record. "Return of the Black Regent" is the sequel to "The Black Regent," a single from Nerves. While the original "Regent" was poppy, this new one is a dark orchestral dirge, hypnotic in its gargantuan portions and allowed to develop into a full cacophony. To screw things up even further, Add N to (X) break with their entire recorded history by using the non-vocoderized Shirley Bassey-esque vocals of Alison Goldfrapp, making the track lushly noisy even in its darkness.
The album closes on a pair of quieter and less frenetic tracks: the groovy, Sterolabby "Oh Yeah, Oh No" and "Machine is Bored with Love." Chiming and whistling like Mono's semi-eponymous hit, "Machine" feels suspended in ether and despite its title, probably more romantic than anything the band has done in the past. While Avant Hard only approaches the satisfaction level of its predecessor, it shows a uniquely powerful electronic band opening doors and exploring all possibilities, refusing to shut itself into harshness or cold minimalistic noodling.
