The drone has become a ubiquitous feature of underground music, a pivotal moment being when John Cale transferred La Monte Young's modernist experiments in the ‘Theatre of Eternal Music' into the realm of Rock'n'Roll with The Velvet Underground.
This in turn was a major influence on Krautrock and now drones can be heard adding an industrial pulse to synthetic dance music or underpinning a wide range of new weird sounds ranging from doom metal to avant-folk.
So this album by Danish threepiece Svartbag can hardly be said to charting new waters but that doesn't take anything away from an impressive debut.
Over the course of five extended instrumentals they create repetitive industrial dronerock founded on the guiding philosophy that "the equipment itself knows what it can and will do".
The process of sifting and selecting sounds from longer pieces presumably explains how this release comes some seven years after they started playing together live.
The band originated in 1996 when two guitarists Niels Ladefoged and A.REX came together ostensibly to work on straight rock songs. REX was a veteran of the punk scene in Copenhagen while Ladefoged, as part of the organsiation Subotnik, has helped organise over 300 experimental concerts. The third member, Peter Kyed, who provides drum programming and sampled 'real sounds', has a background in soundtrack work for movies and computer games.
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On the album Andreas Hauer-Jensen as guest drummer plays on four of the five tracks while Peter Peter performs on the 14 minute closing track 'Billy Name'.
This proves to be the album's highlight. It incorporates voice samples from recordings taken at Andy Warhols' Factory and is, perhaps not surprisingly, the most VU sounding track - a sort of homage to their uber-drone/noise epic 'Sister Ray'.
The band's abrasive sounding name (a scavenging black-backed gull) captures the harsh, sometimes menacing, punk spirit that underlies these tracks.
In keeping with the minimalist spirit there are no climatic rock moments but instead, particularly on the closing track, an insistent driving sense of going nowhere fast.
5t - 49.09m
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