5 out of 5

Label: Sleep FUSE

Produced by: Neil Scrivin

Neil Scrivin’s alterna-past paranoia electro project – Doomlode – finds its first peak with the short, bleak, frightening ‘Destroy Civilisation.’

While sticking to the already established tenets of the pseudonym, Destroy Civilisation balances them all, and injects a tad more musicality: the opener has an industrial beat backing its radio crackle and looped sample, and the two interstitial ambient tracks use that ambience to also maintain a bit of melody, as though some modicum of structure is trying to hang on through the static and unnerving atmosphere. This builds to the most “typical” ‘lode tune, with closer ‘Much Better Than A Human Being’ repeating that phrase over and over a droning tick-tock beat. However, the lead-ins this time make that a really striking and haunting closer; it’s not that previous iterations of this are ineffective, it’s just they come across a bit more as background if you let them, whereas Destroy’s version of it cannot be ignored, given the way the EP is structured.

Super-cool ‘zine-y packaging, as with the other Doomlode releases.