5 out of 5

Label: Load

Produced by: Kris Lapke (engineer)

Wuzzat?  An almost rhythmic Air Conditioning album?  Sorta, maybe.  With the focus on two longer bookend tracks – the 8-minute opening Where To Litter / Trash Burning and the 16-minute closing Accept Your Paralysis / Cephalexin – it’s maybe half-and-half, but Dead Rails is downright tame compared to the ear-blasting noise of Weakness.  (Which I dig, so no judgments there.)  And I’m sure just to get points with me, the album has a followable stylistic arc from start to finish, making repeat listens joyfully easy.  …Either that or my ears have adjust to noise.  Still an excellent disc either way.

The more stoned, blood-and-piss-and-feedback-soaked version of early Lightning Bolt, Air Conditioning switch from hardcore home Level Plane to the more thrashy Load records, and the album seems to speak to this shift over the course of its runtime.  Litter / Trash fits in with previous output, everything buried in the mix behind a wash of thumping, distorted howling, and fuzzy feedback, shifting at its midway point to something a little less busy, as though contemplating the tracks to come.  Followup Conclusions/Concussion follows a similar trend, albeit over 4 minutes, vocals shouts brought to the fore until the two-minute mark brings a sudden slowdown, the shouting shifting to chanting, to talking (still behind a wall of distortion, of course), giving way to the downright… well, okay, not downright, but comparatively downright quiet and aptly-named I Run Low, where, god bless, you can clearly hear an actual bass note.  The concluding track again takes the tactic of assault and response, but the fuzz has been stripped away and the drums feel constant.  Kids could actually bob their head to this if they wanted to, and the lack of vocals and haze make it more clearly identifiable as a ‘song,’ though it’s still brash as all duff.

Noise groups – whether of the hardcore variety, or psych, or whatever – have a tough time finding ways to evolve their sound.  Air Conditioning was eyeball-bleeding bluster on their first release, and found a way to follow it up with something equally aggressive but impressively more expansive and expressive as well.