4 out of 5

Label: Acerbic Noise Development

Producer: Jeff McLeod

Wee-oo this is totally what I wanted.  Let’s get the bad outta the way: the full-length debut from Gezoleen (30 minutes?  12 of which is a hidden track and a cover?  Mmm… Full length) maintains the manic splast of the Oxidado EP but in expanding on the noise… renders the silly up a bit of a notch.  When noise is this fast and aurally offensive, lyrics need to figure out where they fit in to the battle – repeated, shouted mantras (like an Atari Teenage Riot thing), rapaciously delivered wackadooness (a la Daughters or Racebannon)… I can imagine the pitch gets a little more difficult to figure out when you’re mostly a one-man act like Gezoleen, but the half-in half-out lyrics don’t fully convince, and while the static-ized vocals are definitely a part of the shnoizzey palette, as a lot of the tracks lean toward mad sound experiments, it’s hard to take some of the discernible lyrics as more than just textbook angry or vague (textbook vague?).

BUT

Does that distract fromhow awesomely the rest of this recording makes your ears bleed?  Shit no, mf.  The monotone repetitiveness and lack of in-song variation from Oxidado has been whipped and molded into shape on Black Spaces, starting with noise before dropping that syncopated, perhaps electronic beat with screeching vocals huffing atop, and… then suddenly McLeod opens the box of magic and ‘Black Spaces’ blossoms into stops and starts of energy and varying levels of intensity, not really dropping the fucken oomph until the last track, which is a gracious wind-down that actually works beyond noise on repeated listens… the vocodery slowed-down vocals aa perfect drift into silence against an electronic pitter-patter, before 25+ tracks of silence give way to an okey-dokey Dazzling Killmen cover which I won’t include in the review here, because it does weigh down the butt of the album and maybe – for all of Gezoleen’s ability to match DK’s noise levels – not an ideal cover when pitted against the more organic original.

I’m not sure what I would tweak to make this album really sing, maybe grabbing the more blurred out vocals from Oxidado but keeping the experimentalism and fleshed out sound of this album alive… but regardless, somewhere in a world where Flying Luttenbachers turn their instruments into computers and Daughters goes back to screamo there’s Jeff McLeod’s one man insanity of Gezoleen, here on display in a gorgeously harsh rush of noise that remembers, this time out, to make actual songs of things.