The Towers Are Burning

This album's title, together with its cover depicting tangled power lines set against a fiery yellowish-brown backdrop, sets a menacing tone that the music more than lives up to. Here Noisegate has brought together aspects of dark ambient/drone music and hardcore/grind/crust punk and created an ominous, threatening listening experience — too intense to really be considered ambient, but too spacious to be called hardcore or anything of that sort. The title track sets blasts of pure electronic noise and throat-tearing vocal screams against a backdrop of textural, multi-layered industrial ambience, with a heavy feedback drone and other sampled noises such as a distant-sounding power saw entering toward the end. "Solar Eclipse" begins in a similar mode, before eventually veering off into more reassuring harmonies that threaten to become "pretty," but don't quite get there. It's a nice change of pace, even if this section ultimately dissolves fairly quickly back into something darker and more mysterious. The remaining two tracks, which weren't part of the original LP issue, carry on in the same vein and general atmosphere, but they contain enough subtle variety, both texturally and mood-wise, to avoid becoming redundant (even if they aren't quite as impressive as the first two). Noisegate's publishing company happens to be called Feedback Apocalypse, two words that sum up, in a non-embarrassing or overwrought way, the overall vibe of the disc. Remarkable stuff.