3 out of 5

Label: Agoo

Produced by: Steve Albini

The Conformists perhaps pigeonholed themselves from the start: they chose to go completely anti-structure, and chose to go with a funny name to pair with that approach. Hilarious eff-off album artwork and a confusing “theme” to their album titles crafted – with a lot of Steve Albini in the mix – an appealing trio of releases which, taken together, are probably exhaustive, but separately, are pristine drops of some of the no-est-wave post-punk / -rock out there, starting from U.S. Maple’s song deconstruction, and making out with Shellac’s low-end bombast, then proposing a threesome with some related Skin Grafters like Yowie! or somesuch.

The pigeonholing is the expectation shattering: The Conformists kind of completely broke any idea of “song” right at the beginning, making any attempt at song thereafter a tough gamble. Perhaps fittingly, the next album would take a handful of years, and was perhaps motivated by either a poetic desire to “divorce” from their starting point a tad, or – given the lyrics – maybe a real-life event. That is promising, but the group can’t quite get it over the finish line: contrariness is either baked in or lingering from those expectations, preventing a lot of the very solid Shellaac grooves on the record from achieving satisfying punctuations, or from being anarchic / chaotic enough to sit alongside the stuff on the first three records.

The best tracks are either the ones where the group allows themselves room to spread their wings, finding a balance between fitfulness and rock, as on opener Reverse Alchemist; or sink into a more “mature” variety of experimentation with the 13-minute Meow getting to play around with repetition / drone in a more purposeful way than adjacent attempts on the prior albums. The remaining tunes all hit on good little bits of melody, but again, they just don’t cut effectively in either direction – towards rock or deconstruction – and play out like a compromise.

Lyrically, it also feels like we’re intended to hear the words a bit more than before (when the moaning / screaming was just part of the noise), making me think the album title isn’t representative, but unfortunately, a lot of the anger here comes across as a bit cringe – maybe also a mark of it being a bit too close to life.