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Review: 'Disappears'
'Irreal'   

-  Album: 'Irreal' -  Label: 'Kranky'
-  Genre: 'Rock' -  Release Date: '19th January 2015'

Our Rating:
Having transitioned over the course of the ‘Kone’ EP and their last album, ‘Era’, from a fuzzy rock band with twisted garage leanings on their first three long-players to become masters of icy minimalism, Chicago’s Disappears have honed their craft further for their latest offering. The cover art may contain more colour than its predecessor but its minimalist design still provides a suitable indication of the aural works it houses.

Promising ‘a Ballardian mix of imperfect melodies, half thoughts and good ol’ dystopian modernity,’ we’re forewarned that ‘Irreal’ is a master class in texture, pace and control. And indeed it is: everything about the composition and performance of each track whispers restraint. It demands close attention in order to be appreciated. It’s intensity derives from its detachment and focus, from its meticulous detailing and from its carefully composed dynamics.

The album forges a postmodern landscape bereft of humanity, the sonic terrain unforgiving and relentlessly bleak. As Ballard’s texts through the late 1960s to the mid-1970s interrogated and dismantled the concept of conventional linear narrative forms, so ‘Irreal’ finds Disappears deconstructing the elements of ‘rock’ music and dissecting the component parts, stripping them down and examining them in clinical detail.

A mechanoid drum beat thunders an industrial rhythm that provides the rigid spine of the steely grey opener, ‘Interpretation’, dragging the listener into a dark postindustrial wasteland. Brief glimmers of colour peek through in the form of soft-edged synths, but the guitars are gunmetal grey with a sharp, clanging edge.

The title track breaks out into a swathe of pained guitar against a thunderous beat, the vocals monotone and blank and partly submerged. A shimmering mid-section offers a flicker of levity, but it’s on ‘Halcyon Days’ that the band really mark the greatest departure from any overt rock trappings: a simple, repetitive motif stammers across an unforgiving rhythm that has more in common with the conventional tropes of dance music – admittedly, at its most stripped-back and haunting – while the detached vocals hang like mist. Screeds of abstract noise scrape and swirl around the scraping bleakness of ‘Mist Rites’ and it’s as though Disappears have adopted the mantle of Throbbing Gristle in their approach to forging perversely difficult sonic assaults.

The final track ‘Navigating the Void’ drags the listener deeper into a whorling vortex of sound, conventional song structures abandoned to atmosphere, finally reaching a vanishing point at which Krautrock, noise, minimalist electronica and experimentalism converge and fade to black.

Disappears Online
  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Disappears - Irreal