Dusted Reviews
Artist: Mammal Album: Let Me Die Label: Animal Disguise Review date: Mar. 9, 2006 |
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From the worryingly-stark, rosary-twiddling hooded figure to the LP’s title, it’s clear this is a release born of a bleak worldview. Gary Beauvais, the lone member of Mammal, has dug up and given (a kind of) life to the ailing ghost of lo-fidelity sick sound.
Taking advantage of the full-length format for the first time in a few years, Beauvais leaks a smeared trail of aural digital blood across both sides of Let Me Die. There may be gaps between the tracks, but they merely feel like desperate gasps for air. Each song is wracked in just as many throbbing stings as its predecessor. The six tracks sludge forward relentlessly in a queasy collection of percussive clicks and near inward collapsing heaves.
Mammal sounds like it’s working exclusively with the cold innards of wrenched music technology. It’s easy to imagine Beauvais’ fingers pressing down and lifting from the dusty solder and faded wires of some fucked keyboard stack. The primitive nature of the music, quivering on the edge of disintegration or noise fallout, belies the steady structures of dirty rhythmic skeletons. The 15-minute “Days into Days” is dank digitalis, the detritus of dead machines (or Dead Machines) that steadily and dryly crackles out a scratchy bass bin wrecked slug groove.
The sense of forward movement and the hypnotism of the lonely electronic modulated beats bring to mind Chris Carter’s early solo pieces. Except where Carter was sometimes too tidy and too in touch with melody to let the undercarriage rot, Mammal is all about the capture and preservation of steady degradation. These awkward grinding jagged cogs within the songs feel like slow spurts of some oily fibrous liquid; Let Me Die is a visceral experience. Brief bursts of two-minute spluttering like “Fog Days Gone” snake like loose power cables charring into an shaking electro stomp. Where “One More Day” is a low-end revolving bass part, the other end of pitch is pummeled by “Some Day’s” endless nameless scar tissue. This is not a retread of formerly walked dark paths.
Beauvais’ repeated use of “day” in his titles adds a sense of time slipping away towards the inevitable end. Infused with nihilism, Mammal’s grasp on rhythm and sound is as emotive a production job as you’ll see in this lo-fi quick turnaround ‘write record release’ genre.
By Scott McKeating
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Fog III / Double Nature