Hiram-Maxim - Ghosts (Aqualamb) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

It's getting dark out there. People are seething. And when it all comes crashing down, this is the sound you'll hear. Ghosts, the second release from Cleveland's HIRAM-MAXIM, is a whorl of punishing noise and pounding beats, dark textures, bleak visions and howls of pain.The authors of this beautiful nightmare - Fred Gunn, Lisa Miralia, John Panza and Dave Taha- are veterans of the Cleveland scene. They came together through the Lottery League, a citywide festival of ad-hoc collaboration. Taking in doom, noise, psych and shoegaze, the band’s sound is a testament to that anarchic spirit and the members' disparate backgrounds.Gunn did time in punk bands. Miralia is an established figure on the noise scene (her rig, featured in Gear Gods, is the envy of pedal geeks everywhere). Taha, whose previous band, Filmstrip, dealt in far-sunnier hooks, counts Elizabeth Cotten and Thurston Moore among his influences. Panza, meanwhile, plays with reckless abandon in several bands despite having only one lung. He lost the other to a bout with malignant pleural mesothelioma. He was lucky to survive.HIRAM-MAXIM recorded GHOSTS with Martin Bisi at his legendary BC Studio in Brooklyn, with some portions captured at John Delzoppo's Cleveland studio, Negative Space. Clocking in at 42 minutes, the record's seven tracks are as sprawling and expansive as those on the band's self-titled debut. That 2014 LP drew praise from outlets like Vice and Decibel. But GHOSTS is a step forward, its songs more focused and more vicious.Fred Gunn's vocals are spoken and screamed, accusations and absolutions that take in personal suffering and state-sponsored acts of oppression. Lisa Miralia's processed vocals and DIY electronics conjure up synthetic squalls and clouds of distortion, warped and abrasive textures that obscure the dark, bloozy groove laid down by guitarist Dave Taha and drummer John Panza. And guest guitarist Oliver Ackermann, of A Place to Bury Strangers, adds sonic broken glass to the opener, "Behind the Blindfold" and the title track, "Ghosts".On "Burn", Panza's thudding rhythms march in step with Taha's fuzzed out stoner riffs until the whole is subsumed by a distorted swell of Miralia's electronics and ambient noise. The title track, "Ghosts", is a Sonic Youth-on-PCP basher with its propulsive churn and dissonant shredding. Here Gunn points to the underlying theme, observing, "there's darkness all around us." "The Pain of the Price" closes out the record with textured, slow-burn psych.The band takes its name from the Anglo-American inventor Hiram Stevens Maxim. He's best known for the Maxim gun, an ur-machine gun that helped turn Europe into an open-air slaughterhouse in World War I. It was an appropriate choice.

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