4 out of 5

Label: Sympathy for the Record Industry

Produced by: Skullflower (?)

An appropriately titled transition: Skullflower began to move (slightly) away from noise assaults to more spacey, open-ended jams, with Transformer’s comparative accessibility signaled by appearing on a more accessible label – Sympathy for the Record Industry – and a picture of an actual human being on the cover, an image far and away from the alien, tortured sounds generally associated with the act. 

Sequentially, the disc almost plays out like a joke: a short intro track gives way to a legit, straight-forward roxker, before moving into several longform ambient / feedback explorations, and then a later shift at disc’s end back to louder material, plus vocal caterwauling. I would say these “transitions” don’t necessarily work, with one section not really playing well with another, but the overall impact of the disc is massive, with the tip-toe towards experimentation and noise also making it mesmerizing. Bower (and crew) almost always excel at this: how long can you sustain the line between loud and too loud, wandering and randomness, before you lose your audience? And with Transformer, the balance is coded within individual tracks – Cut Loose, for example, separated into a part 1 and 2, from quiet to volume – and the project itself, its hard shifts nonetheless serving as clean breaks which reset one’s expectations. 

Transformer is perhaps missing the blissed out beauty of some of its before-and-after Bower efforts, but it succeeds with a kind of directness: as it transforms, if somewhat abruptly, there’s not a track that feels without drive or intention, its richness not only top tier Skullflower, but also a great entryway into broader music experiments of this type.