Review:

on 2011-09-06 CharlesMartel Said:

An individual's affection, or otherwise, for a particular album is often linked with a moment in time. An album that reminds you of happy times or is of particular relevance to an important time in your life will frequently be held in higher regard than one which is not. However, an album, or even a genre of music, can also be inextricably linked with particular circumstances, like when one is happy or depressed or in love.

Listening to "Satin Black" it is important to remember this last point, for it is definitely music which gains greater relevance, and therefore is liked more, under certain circumstances. The first time I heard it, I was travelling along a train on a bright sunny morning, with the sunlight streaming through the windows of the carriage. It kind of passed me by at the time and felt totally incongruous to the situation. The second time I heard it was late at night. I was tired and my sciatica was giving me hell so I just went to bed and put this on as I fell asleep. Except I did not get any sleep until it was over, such was the empathy I was able to feel.

This is not music for the daylight, it is most definitely music for the night, a quiet still night with no moon and a cloudy sky rendering everything outside of points of artificial light a uniform blackness. Without being either, at those moments this is more metal than metal, more Goth than Goth. Paik have made an album which would make you feel that thick fog was your natural environment. It is a thick, miasmic sludge resulting from a dense throbbing bass line overlaid by what sounds like loosely tuned guitar strings put through loads of reverb and underpinned by drumming which is what you would expect John Bonham would sound like if he was playing through the thick brick retaining wall between the room you are in and the room next door.

Each track has, if you listen closely, its own distinct style, even though on first listen it all sounds remarkably similar. For a start there are no lyrics, so you have to listen hard. Second, each song is pretty long - two of the five are over fourteen minutes while the shortest comes in at a shade under seven and a half minutes. Finally, the bass often sounds as if it were a down tuned lead guitar and at times, there is virtually nothing to distinguish the bass from the lead. The opening track, "Jayne Field" has the sort of repetitive three chord riff which many a punk band built a short-lived career around as bass and lead merge together into an indistinct sludge, only to fall out during the bridge.

The next two tracks, "Dirt for Driver" and the title track are built around a powerful bass line which anchors the tracks while the lead swirls around as if this were a shoegaze egofest. "Dizzy Stars" has perhaps the strongest melody, but melody is not a strong point in Paik's music. Finally, "Stellar Meltdown en el Oceano" dispenses with melody almost entirely and spends almost fifteen minutes entirely in a low end feedback drone. If you have ever seen those futuristic movies where humans are just slaves trapped in gigantic industrial complexes, well this is the soundtrack to such films: dense, monotonous and overpowering. Any complexity in the sound, any variation is tone is a conundrum. Is the variation or complexity really there, or is it just the brain attempting to put an order, a meaning to something which has neither?

In the end, it has a kind of beauty which you can appreciate, but not exactly feel at ease with. The album is disconcerting. It is not everyday music. It is not something you might wish to listen to regularly. It is an album which is confined to those moments when the mood, and the environment suit. It will never be a favourite, but it might be something of a necessity.
Rating: 6/10