It’s so easy to grow jaded in this line of work. You’ve got 200 links and downloads from bands and PR firms all begging you to listen to the hot new release from some band who are sensational and sound like nothing else you’ve never heard, and ultimately, they’re nearly all awful, turgid and generic. It’s rare that an album really grabs you by the throat, drags you from your torpor, makes you sit up, wide-eyed and attentive and sit slack-jawed and stunned. ‘Contact Fix’ is one of those releases that does that.
ATC simply explode in all directions from the get-go. It’s mathy, sure, but within the first two minutes they do space-age, they do grunge, they do prog. None of it sounds forced or self-conscious, and despite the divergency of the movements, they somehow make the most unexpected of transitions (which is all of them) sound effortless. It would take some time to adjust to, if they gave you any time. But all you can do is sit down, shut up and marvel at the wold wizardry.
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Grating basslines squirm free of samples that come from nowhere, before, finally, a minute and a half into ‘Baltirific’, there’s a passage that sounds like conventional math-rock, guitar noodles interweaving in a gloriously tight pattern. But then whizzy electronica and a deluge of overdrive crashes in like a tsunami. They pack some serious weight behind those delicate overlays to create a magnificently textured soundwerk that doesn’t readily conform to genre trappings.
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