Looped, atonal singing, skittering noise and dark static… It all adds up to one thing. I Am A Man With A St Tropez Tan is back, this time with a darker, dirtier set of ambient noise, harrowing samples and metallic guitar scree. Opening track ‘killing seals’ is a perfect case in point, sounding not unlike the Orb filtered through the arid clouds of noise summoned by the Swans. It’s a hell of a way to start an album and it leaves the listener feeling thoroughly unsettled. In contrast, the naked indie guitar of ‘don’t know’ emerges as a complete surprise until its unsettled by a hellish scree of distorted noise, not unlike something Chris Morris might have produced back in the days of Brass Eye. Filtered and abused through the liquid bubbling of the bong from hell, ‘don’t know’ is the result of too many late nights listening to Pink Floyd’s almost unlistenably experimental ‘Ummagumma’ and the existential nightmare that is ‘hello Rick’ does little to offer respite. If you’re looking for conventional beats and coherent tunes, then look elsewhere, but if you’re looking for a warped journey through the mind of an individual slowly breaking under the strain of a modern existence surrounded by the internet of things, then this album is for you. Adopting a somewhat contradictory pose, the disturbingly-titled ‘it’s brutal out there’ emerges in a meditative state, relaxed to the point of somnambulism before suddenly bowing under the weight of a torrent of melted-circuit distortion and noise. Inevitably there are echoes of Autechre, Aphex Twin and Lustmord to be found amidst the scattered samples and twisted soundscapes, Rick Senley building upon the awkward work of those artists to create something that frays the nerve endings. It’s not helped, either, by the surging oscillators and echoing noise of ‘August Christmas’ which sounds like Christmas only if you imagine spending Christmas trapped inside Hitchcock’s The Birds.
With the album fading to nothing for the first time, ‘Thai News’ emerges from silence, as synth pads shimmer in the darkness. A more restful track it radiates a calm that stands in opposition to the frequently confrontational noise found in the album’s first half. Whilst samples creep in that seek to subvert the atmosphere, the heat-haze noise suggest sadness rather than inarticulate rage, although there’s a dissonance that underpins the piece that suggests the mood could break at any moment. And break it does, but not perhaps in the way that you’d expect. The skittering beat of ‘Somewhere in Bagan’ is playful rather than fuelled by misanthropy and the result is a piece that could easily sit amidst the remixes found on Banco De Gaia’s ‘Last Train to Lhasa’. Similarly, ‘Sinai Dogs’ is danceable, assuming they have dance floors in the asylum, with the beats emerging to the fore with considerable force. It can’t last, however, and the veil of insanity falls once more on the dizzying horror of ‘He even freed the Jews’. The album concludes with ‘The wolf of Drury lane’, a barking, slobbering mess that segues into one last moment of Aphex-y oddness, seeing the album out on an uncomfortable high.
It’s a difficult thing to grade this album because it’s so utterly (and contentedly) niche in nature. It’s not easy listening and it’s not easily labelled suffice it to say that it fits somewhere into the great pantheon of electronica. Fans of the avant-garde possibilities of electronic music will love it, and it’s easy to see it crossing over into noise rock territory as well (think Skullflower), and for such people the record comes highly recommended. For those who prefer readily identifiable and familiar structures, however, this is probably a migraine in compact disc form. Hey ho. I think it’s cool – original, well-crafted and wonderfully disturbed, but I give it an 8 with the caveat that you temper your expectations accordingly!
Check out the album here.
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