Bandcamp The sleeve is a photograph of a toy stunt car, caught mid-flip a foot above a football pitch, its shadow on the grass beneath it and a goal standing empty in the distance. The album is called SUPER REBOUND and the band say it is about the ultimate comeback arc. A cheap plastic car that flips over and lands back on its wheels is exactly that, rendered at the smallest possible scale, on a Sunday league pitch in Belgium. It is funny and it is not a joke.
The brackets
Nine tracks, and three of them have titles in square brackets: “[HORNS WAILING]”, “[SIREN SINGING]”, “[BELLS RINGING, TALE MELTING]”. Those are not song titles, they are descriptions of a sound. The band have labelled three pieces by what happens in them rather than naming them, which on an album about recovery reads as a deliberate refusal to narrate.
Two of them behave the way you expect. “[HORNS WAILING]” and “[SIREN SINGING]” have no guitars, no bass and no drums, and they sit so far below the songs around them in level that the first one is barely there and the second is close to silence. Ninety seconds and under a minute respectively. On the measurements they are not quiet songs, they are a different kind of object entirely.
The third one is where the record turns. “[BELLS RINGING, TALE MELTING]” runs over six minutes, as long as anything here, and it spends the first stretch on clean guitar before it collapses into the heaviest thing on the album. It is the widest swing between quiet and loud on the record and it is the closer. A band that has spent the album labelling its interludes by their noise ends by letting one of those interludes become the finale.
The songs between
Ruben Savelkoul, Michiel De Naegel and Cyril Beerten all sing, Mattias Jonniaux drums, and the record was recorded at GAM Studios, mixed by Scott Evans and mastered by Matthew Barnhart. That is a serious chain for a band with no label listed on the release, and it shows: this is dense, abrasive music that keeps its chords legible instead of collapsing into mud.
“UNSOUND HERO” is the best of the straight songs and the one that moves most, six minutes that go from a cavernous low-end crawl to something much faster without the transition feeling bolted on. “MOUNTAINESQUE 4” works the same territory with more patience and a cleaner room. “THE GUMS” opens the album on an almost liturgical organ figure before the wall lands, which sets up the bracket-pieces before you know they are coming.
Where it gives ground is late. “SUPER REBOUND” and “SWERVER” sit next to each other and are the two tightest things here, holding a narrow band between their quiet and their loud where everything else on the album is willing to drop out and come back. Coming after “[SIREN SINGING]” has stripped the record down to almost nothing, that pair feels like the album marking time until the closer arrives.
So
Yes, and without much hesitation. This is the most structurally interesting record I have heard out of the Belgian noise and sludge corner this year, the production is genuinely good rather than merely loud, and the decision to end on a six minute piece that the tracklist presents as an interlude is the kind of nerve that usually gets edited out before release. The caveat is the two songs before it, which hold position where the rest of the album moves. Come for the closer, stay for “UNSOUND HERO”, and do not skip the short bracketed pieces, because they are doing structural work rather than filling space.
The bracketed tracks measure as a separate category rather than as quiet songs. “[HORNS WAILING]” sits roughly ten decibels below the songs in average level and “[SIREN SINGING]” more than twenty, with almost no energy below 250 hertz and almost none above five kilohertz, which is the picture of a sustained low drone with no kit and no strings. Both put more than sixty percent of their energy into the midrange where the songs run in the mid fifties. The third bracket behaves nothing like them: “[BELLS RINGING, TALE MELTING]” sits at song level and opens twenty two decibels between its quietest and loudest passages, the widest range on the album. Among the songs, “UNSOUND HERO” is the most dynamic at nearly nineteen decibels and the second darkest, while “SUPER REBOUND” and “SWERVER” are the two narrowest at three and a half and five decibels and hold nearly identical tonal pictures. Nothing here is mastered flat, peaks keep a clear distance from the average throughout.
Standout tracks: [BELLS RINGING, TALE MELTING], UNSOUND HERO, THE GUMS
