Winters In Osaka - Molded To Crawl - Music CD

Molded to Crawl reviews Woah, the last time I had heard anything from this band, it was like seven years ago on some CD-R comp that I had gotten from the tiny noise/grind label Fecal-Matter Discorporated. I vaguely remembered the Winters In Osaka stuff being brutal, sloppy harsh noise, but never heard anything else that they did after that. Fast forward to 2009, and out of the blue I have these guys getting in touch to see if we'd be interested in carrying their new album. Seems that they've been pretty busy over the past few years, and have actually evolved into something much much heavier and more violent sounding than what I remember. Molded To Crawl comes to us from the grind label Haunted Hotel, but this sure ain't grind, even if there are a bunch of notorious grinders that appear here to lend a hand in creating some skullcrushing NOIZE. The core trio of guys behind Winters In Osaka are joined by members of The Endless Blockade, 7000 Dying Rats, Canuck experimental-grinders Fuck The Facts and the mighty Rich Hoak from Brutal Truth/Total Fucking Destruction for thirty-six minutes of harsh, crushing industrial heaviness, and it's a ferocious set. The first track 'triumph Of Wolves' is a monstrous seventeen minute slab of blackened chaos, opening with a murky industrial throb, muted voices and smoldering feedback and electronics, then growing into a vicious blast of high end feedback shriek splattered with roaring vocals, blown out distorted synths, brutal Total style guitar mangle, rushes of moaning low end, that pounding heartbeat like stutter rumbling underneath of everything through the almost the entire track, turning what would otherwise be a freaked out wall of psychedelic skree into a more hypnotic and menacing bit of rhythmic heaviness that reminds me of Sword Heaven. That goes double for the second track 'Through Twilight', an ultra-heavy mass of slow motion percussive pound like a reverb-soaked Swans jam, massive crushing drums stomping over a weird sitar-like melody and tinkling, woozy musicbox chimes. The rest of the album is more abstract but just as heavy and noisy, filled with washes of distorted dark ambience, massive walls of blow out drone, plodding tribal oil drum rhythms, symphonies of sheet metal cacophony, scraping metal, horrific screams and gurgling death-metal style vokills, bursts of ultra low-fi thrashcore (!!!) mutated into swathes of demonic black industrial, chopped up samples, chaotic stretches of pummeling industrial metal mixed with buzzing mechanical ambience, waves of mutated tape-noise, Sabbathian garage slime, various samples chopped up and rearranged into a nightmarish mass of bizarre plunderphonic horror. Fucking awesome! Like a way blacker, heavier, messed up Sword Heaven. The name alone suggests that this is going to be a cold sounding release and even though it is a beautiful sunny day out, the sounds are still powerful enough to drag me into a darker place. On a journey of sounds and noise, Molded To Crawl travels through many realms to keep it interesting. From building up tribal like bass rhythms mixing with harsh eruptions, catchy clashing of sounds to form clanging beats and patterns of mashing noise and chaos, simple cold ambient soundscapes and then closing with live instrument jams that leave the room spinning with sounds. Winters In Osaka have definitely succeeded in creating a well put together piece of experimental music. Attest from these Midwestern noiseniks, this time with a full complement of assistant noisemakers, including Rich Hoak (Brutal Truth, Total Fucking Destruction) as well as folks from Fuck The Facts, The Endless Blockade and 7000 Dying Rats! Sounds like a seriously noisy nasty party indeed. The last Winters In Osaka we reviewed was Orchids, and unlike a lot of noise music, it was way more rhythmic and textural, offering up a series of sort of fractured skitters and looped grooves, all liberally doused with plenty of noisiness. But we knew these guys were capable of kicking up a serious din and they do just that on Molded To Crawl. Opening with a 17 minute epic, that begins with muted percussion, samples, buzzing electronics, which quickly builds to a full on face melting skree, but within that skree, synths squiggle, vocals howl, guitars feedback, sirens wail, the chaotic blowout does seem to occasionally almost slip into something drone-y or almost riff like, but for the most part, it's a thick dense wall of sound that is not for the faint of ear. The other three tracks are shorter, and tend toward the darker and the dronier, again rooted around plodding percussion, and layered buzz, the sound veers from lurching machine like industrial lumber, to Godfleshy stomp, to haunting Eastern music box over roiling blacknoise, to thick whirring buzzscape, to wildly careening and crumbling wave of low end crush, to skittery crunch and glitch, to thick windblown wasteland sountrack, to chopped up plunderphonia, to haunting hushed drift. Cool stuff, but definitely be warned, this is some seriously noisy shit! Here's a brand new outing from this Chicago band, firmly ensconced in a genre I am not at all familiar with, save for hearing the names mentioned on certain occasions. As for the music, this is the first time that I have actually listened to a full electronic/noise album (and several times at that). Don't be fooled by some of the guest names on Molded to Crawl, who ought to be quite familiar to those with interest in grind and/or power violence. Rich Hoak (Brutal Truth, Total Fucking Destruction) may contribute but don't expect any shredding blastbeats or hardcore speed. Instead, be prepared for some strange power electronic noise to radiate from your speakers. Those familiar with the band, or at the very least this's t y l e of music, will know about the complete lack of a song structure. At times Molded to Crawl and it's feedback- drenched sound resembles the ending of a song, just as it is fading out into complete silence but here it never comes. "Through Twilight" is the only cut that offers some kind of coherent arrangement with some truly spooky instrumentation. The whole record is quite an unnerving and jarring experience to sit through, but it will leave you wanting more of it. After knowing nothing of the genre beforehand, I feel like researching it more and that definitely includes earlier Winters in Osaka recordings. Very impressive modern power electronics influenced noise. Takes elements from various EFX pedals to live vocals with contact mics. Even sludge riffs behind all of it, giving this band a new spin on the noise scene. Another noisy release from the Winters In Osaka trio, who are actually from Chicago. For this release, they've got the help of a few friends (members from 7000 Dying Rats, Brutal Truth, etc...) Starts off with a 17 minute horrific epic of power electronics! Complete with moaning wind tunnel sounds and screeching metal scraps. Tracks all start with some awkward hidden conversation. Track 2 gets a little PYSCHO circus on you, with hints of a demented music toybox. A great fucked up melodic tune, with a sitar (?) and bubbling lava too! Ends abruptly. Track 3 gets you going on the subway tunnel from hell. Lots of windy sounding rails, and a mysterious flute. The final one alternates between being in a mosh pit, to sitting in the middle of a fire scorched desert on Mars. Noise, in fragments for sure. MTC = Spoken American some political commentator amidst low-fi low-volume sounds which slowly envelope the work "Triumph of Wolves" the second track begins with some domestic contestations soon disappearing to be replaced by massive metal clanging like some huge badly made robot walking? Track three begins with quiet rising tones and squeaky door hinges...which again becomes clanking noise, reverb metal, whilst the final offering begins almost like a band, but morphs again into metal and this time animalist noise- only to see the band re-appear and disappear as the tape slowly grinds to a halt. Machine noise, almost cattle, burbling...which is Caligula in fragments, the band re-appears, I don't know what is going on? .. I'm reminded (though god knows why) of Sigmar Polke's strange mix of the representational and abstract as one of the early post modern attempts at somehow re-interpretation re-inversion of modernity, which might have offered some neo-romantic alternative to high modernism but IMO failed to establish anything other than an individualistic peculiarity - something these works maybe have, kept in-sufficient to match the more robust, outwardly not old art moves of the YBA's. That makes both Polke's work and these strangely nostalgic, odd that the present feels more like the past than the 80s (jliat)