- It seemed like everyone in the noise underground made a dance record last year, and some of the finest came from the Wolf Eyes camp. Of those, Nate Young's Stay Asleep (Regression Vol. 2) received a lot of the shine, but Young's work with Dave Shettler in Moon Pool & Dead Band was equally inventive. Human Fly, their first release of 2012, finds them as amorphous as ever.
The title track opens proceedings with a nine-minute tangle of degraded tones and a fairly deranged main melody, held together by skronky, shuffling drums that, while programmed, are off-kilter and raw enough to resemble someone tirelessly pounding away on a drum kit. "Jagged Orbit" recalls Severed Heads and Throbbing Gristle (particularly "Hot on the Heels of Love") in its enervated, wormy synthlines, which are stuck on a similarly anemic, halted 4/4 rhythm. Like those groups, they conjure an odd sense of beauty from such withered material, as the synths, warbling and wavy, dance like sunlight on water. Finally, "Cyber Rebels" melds bulbous alien chirps with a thrusting house template, as eroding noise and rocketing, Oneohtrix-like Juno-60 lines fluctuate underneath. The "band" in the duo's name is accurate. They resemble a garage band playing dance music, with all the mistakes, chaos and perfect moments of synchronicity that would entail.
Tracklist A Human Fly
B1 Jagged Orbit
B2 Cyber Rebels