In the great abstraction of reality we’ve been living through, I always hoped that the upside would be frustrated musicians and non-musicians turning inward. While collaborative and band situations are an exercise in creative diplomacy, and generally necessary for sifting out atrocious ideas crowbarred into the mix by insistent individuals, you’re never really seeing a pure form of brain spew where happy accidents, technical leprosy and musicians autism are as much a part of the process as knowing what the fuck you’re doing.
Back in the normal world, Sister Odd was/is a member of Witchkicker, but this offering is something very different to that band. By way of providing a mood-board, the Sister Odd Instagram is a butchery of monochromatic images and patches of noise, all suggesting that there’s more under construction and that the direction tip-toes a thin line between cacophony and foreboding anti-pop.
This is a one-track digital single release – The format is irritating in that it has no flipside and no comparative or accompanying material (although joyous in that it doesn’t contain seven bogus remixes by DJ twits like the contemptible CD single). It’s never easy to make a fair assessment on a new entity based on an isolated track, but it’s how we have elected to conveniently digest our music for better or worse, so I’ll have to run with it.
As a debut slice of noise to present to the world, Bruise/Reuse forges an impressive space for itself. Gnarled percussive twists and an electronic piano motif guide the vocals through playfully deceptive sparsity, buttressed by segments of riffy noise, although this resists the trope of a loud/quiet dynamic by confidently opting to focus on a subtle throughline – This plays to the track’s obvious strengths. There’s some sinister whispering, ominous backward rushes and with a final cycle of the noisy stuff, the whole thing evaporates… 3:54 is all we get for now.
Bruise/Reuse plays with nebulous strains of gothic pop gloom, industrial detailing, and an idiosyncrasy that owes as much to the bluesy trip-hop swagger of Portishead as it does to its darker influences.
It’s a convincing start.
