Jazkamer - Metal Machine Music
March 21 2008 at 01:09:06 AM
Scandinavian noise duo drops two consonants and reassembles familiar metal tropes inside a rigid, noise-structured LP. Despite founder member Lasse Marhaug's credentials (Norwegian male, tape-traded with members of Emperor and Mayhem in his youth) Metal Music Machine is nothing if not opportunistic. There are significant parallels between the noise genre and Black Metal, most are superficial and none are a revelation. (Sunflower, at least, managed to link the two without being too obvious) What's of concern here is the extreme self-consciousness on the one hand, of both bands and labels that promote music as entirely genre-applicable, bordering on parody. And on the other, of "metal" bands that cater to an audience that normally wouldn't want a goddamn thing to do with it, pushed by the kind of writers/promoters that feel they need to sugarcoat and even apologetically account for what makes metal…metal. Jazkamer lies somewhere in between: acquiring the requisite font and aesthetic only to pick the theme apart piece by piece. Faintly nostalgic tremolo picking extends into absurd lengths of time, contrasted with a very Khanate feel for space. Rumbling Jazz fills substitute for blast beats and multi-tracked growling nonsense fills the cracks. Disregarding the Savage Pencil cover art, it's all too indifferent to condescend. The album is both mercantile and intelligent, the performance organic but unemotional – its atmosphere only clinical exhibition; a novelty career moment. And that's just swell, so long as a career isn't made out of it. If anything, it sweetens the air after enduring Sunn and co. compare bowel movements for 53 minutes.
[Todd DePalma]
Jazkamer
Metal Music Machine
2006
Smalltown Supernoise
http://www.smalltownsupersound.com
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