Drainolith - Fighting! 8.5

                Drainolith’s ‘Fighting’ stumbles around in an incoherent mess. Those drum machines have no idea how to keep a beat. Good thing the singer appears to just remember what he’s supposed to sing off the top of his damaged mind. Everything here is so gone, like every song took a bunch of drugs and pretended it was sober. Nope, the songs fool no one. Something is clearly off in this aural environment. Hits land nowhere near where they are supposed to, the guitar sounds like some kind of Bill Orcutt leftover cut, and the whole thing is doused in sheens of frustrated No Wave anger. Put simply, I love this album. 

                The opener is pop friendly in comparison to what follows. Still, the drum machine tries in vain to keep up with a non-existent tempo. Alexander Moskos mutters some stuff that is in English but otherwise remains intelligible. Here is where the Royal Trux vibe is most strongly felt. Parts of this even veer towards a ‘rock-like’ sound. Yet it remains too idiosyncratic for such pigeon-holing. ‘You Paid for It’ references rock in between its more industrial synthesizer work. Eventually this industrial sound overtakes the album in the latter half with the drunken ‘Southern Eye’ which barely feels conscious of what’s going on around it. It ends the way it should with an elongated synthesizer solo going nowhere for roughly half the song. 

                Rarely is there an album this completely free of convention. Even noise albums have a certain template. Everything on here works to subvert the idea of structure. Love the disorder. Embrace the chaos.