5 out of 5

Label: 54’40 or Fight! / Africantape (two separate releases, not a split)

Produced by: Steve Albini

I got no complaints.

…Except that it’s unlistenable!

Five stars.

And now I explain:

When I first put on Conformists’ Three Hundred – and this was the first Confirmists record I’d heard – I was all, like, cool, U.S. Maple-ized abstraction meets mathcore intensity!  This record and I are in love!  But when the album never managed to make it into my regular rotation, my love flipped to hate, and those delightfully digressive quirks became targets of disdain: the group purposefully avoided a groove or settling on a riff!  The vocals were in a void between disinterest and passion!  The sequencing seemed designed to punish you via stops and starts before even considering something long enough to be a song!  It’s… it’s… UNLISTENABLE.

I was going to rate it appropriately, with a bump to two stars for, at least, the group presenting with purpose: the disc didn’t feel sloppy or amateur, just bereft of  care for the listener.

And then, as sometimes happens, fate intervened: I tend to make myself listen to a record until I actually review it, and I kept having other things to do besides the review, so Three Hundred kept playing on and on on repeat in my headphones.  It’s a short listen: 30 minutes.  I discovered, after a while, that I no longer heard starts and stops.   That I was tapping my foot along to the songs.  That it started to make sense: that the weird slurred but aggressive vocals were the only possible way to sync with the melting riffs; that the sequencing intentionally moved from abstract into “formal,” with longer track times and some repeated themes; that the whole disc became this synchronized performance, or dance, and my whole mind and body were now invested in the experience: starting from silence – 30 seconds of which comprises our opening track – and then the earthquake, stuttering distraction of Laundry Hepburn and Stairway to Heaven.  As songs progress, vocalist guy screams, trying to wrap his brain around IT – whatever IT may be – and then we’re slowly reigned in for some slint-y / shellac-y pummeling in the final few tracks.

Boy oh boy, it took some work, but… I have no complaints.