Review:'NUMBERS ARE FUTILE' 'Sunlight On Black Horizon'
- Label: 'Song, By Toad'
- Genre: 'Indie'
- Release Date: '15th June 2015'
Our Rating:
The swirling, dervish rhythms of The Great Chimera engulf the unsuspecting listener for a full-on WTF effect which sounds like a halfway house between tranced-out Prog.Rock and all that stuff that gets unceremoniously lumped under the World Music heading.
It's a disorientating experience. At times I thought I heard snatches of Santana's Jingo but this may have just been my imagination running away with me.
The album is unleashed via Edinburgh's very excellent Song, By Toad Records but it comes as no surprise to learn that the Numbers Are Futile duo are not Scottish. Filipe Bernado was born in Lisbon while Panos Baros is from Athens.
The two met by chance at a party and,in what must have been one helluva conversation, they found that they shared a love of "thick walls of sound and perpetual loops of harmonic havoc".
A jam session at Edinburgh College of Art ensued and,after many improvisations, a three track DIY EP ,recorded in a printing studio basement, was released in 2013.
Now comes a full length album with the same raw ingredients i.e. synths, samples, drums and madness.
Oblivion Days is its pounding centrepiece and,after 8 recurrent bouts of tribal-disco feverishness, the record ends with the portentously titled Doomsday Blues.
We hear voices but the words are a blur and almost certainly some spaced-out gobbledegook anyway. It's the sonic overkill (without a comfort zone) that counts. This is precisely why the tracks are best experienced at high volume.
Listeners of a nervous disposition should however take note of the warning that accompanies the video (replete of strobe effects) for the album's opening track: "May cause seizure or momentary loss of consciousness".
Like the strongest medication this record is probably best consumed in small doses.
