Geisha
Die Verbrechen Der Liebe
6.9
Like fellow Crucial Blast-ers Black Elk, the UK's Geisha blend post-metal, punk, and noise into a calamitous whole, and like Black Elk, they do it well. Take one part jagged riff, one part droning post-whatever ambience, and one part squealing dissonant freak-outs, put it all together in a floating, seemingly free-form jam and then splatter the whole thing with white-noise distortion... Do that for thirty minutes, and then follow up with a thirty-minute Merzbow-meets-My Bloody Valentine-meets-The-Jesus-Lizard punk/space/noise collage, and this is what you get, all coming from a band whose bio offers this by way of explanation: "We began like many groups out of boredom and sheer hatred of what was around us, not to save music, but to destroy it through an ever increasing number of FX units."
The guitars are bent, twisting and squalling. The drums are punky and chaotic, alternating between subdued grooves and frenzied, explosive outbursts. What vocals there are, which are few and far between, are distorted almost beyond recognition, floating low in the mix, just another component in Geisha's wall of noise, with little more importance, if any more at all, placed upon them than on any other part of the whole.
In truth, there’s not a lot more to say about this one—it’s good; it’s worth your time, and especially so if you’re predisposed to the noisier side of the metallic spectrum. It won’t change your life, but it will (or should) entertain you. Without being repetitive or delving to scholarly depths, this one’s a hard record to describe in much more detail than that. Die Verbrechen Der Liebe (which is German for "the crime of love") is an exhausting listen; it's a beast of a record, difficult to digest because it's not only sonically abrasive, but it's also a full hour long, a full hour of churning, grating ear-bending noise laid atop angular punk. The first half—the more structured part of the record—is far more engaging, and truthfully, I can’t see myself sitting through that thirty-minute closing track on a regular basis, if again at all after I finish this review. Regardless, divorcing that from the rest, the first half-hour of Die Verbrechen is enough to reel me in. Even at its most accessible, which is a word I hesitate to use here, Die Verbrechen is not an instant-gratification quick-fix. But then again, if unchallenging music is what you’re going for, what are you doing still reading this?
