Ultra//Negative Finally I'm At Peace

Ultra//Negative are finally at peace and wish to make this fact known to you, and to the world at large, by screaming incoherently a few inches from your collective faces for eight and a half minutes. 

iTunes neatly shoehorns this deranged New Hampshire-based combo into a genre called Power Violence, which apparently exists as a polar opposite to those anthologies of whale song set to new age music. Calling the opening track on your EP Rebirth hints at the kind of gossamer Aquarian folk that might grace an Enya album and feature the Celtic songstress wafting ethereally through soft focus woodland in a diaphanous white dress, however this is a red herring. In the world of Ultra//Negative Rebirth can only be a herald to 50 seconds of unfocused thrash, fierce blast of drums and an out of breath vocal pitched between a scream and a rant.

On the basis of these eight tracks, Power Violence, for all the swagger and menace the name implies, best encapsulates the moment when the ordinarily docile kid at your school completely loses their composure and comes running towards you with their arms flailing wildly. Once you get over the initial shock it’s both tragically comic and life-affirming. The first 30 seconds of My Head sound like someone franticly speed-reading a book, having  possibly been asked to do so at gunpoint, against a soundtrack of discordant metal. This is characteristic of a band who play on a permanently uneven footing of their own creation. The songs here all run together making the EP seem like the aftermath of a grisly collision where identifying individuals in amongst the tangled wreckage becomes problematic.

Odd things stand out. The first second of Purge is like world music gone terribly, terribly wrong. From Nothing To Nothing commences with bursts of frenetic drumming, snarled vocals and squalls of guitar, compressed together and separated by more conventional riffage.  Transparent turns down the wick, starting out like doom metal and managing to keep this measured pretence going for 25 seconds, after which the song shifts up several gears at once, and the drum kit sounds like its bouncing off the interior of a industrial tumble dyer. It’s these moments when the band slow down to a walking pace and allow the dust to settle that the gaps in their ability are most apparent, giving cause to wonder if their high energy, shock and awe approach to making music isn’t a conscious attempt at disguising a lack of ideas.

Ultra//Negative are not original in any sense of the word. They play with a complete absence of finesse and make no concessions to melody. Any deeper meaning that might be hidden in the lyrics of tracks like Throat Cutters Union are lost in a blizzard of noise and poor elocution. None of this will be of any news  to the band, who are at least aware that the worst thing this kind of over-caffeinated music can do is outstay its welcome. Finally I’m  At Peace enters your life like a rampaging gang of drunken teenagers, smashes your mental furniture, vomits on the rug and then exits through a broken window before the police arrive.