Total Shutdown
“Total Shutdown”
Tigerbeat6
There are two possibilities I can fathom for the creation of the first full length album – and by full length I mean 26 minutes – by San Francisco’s Total Shutdown, a band that has received the blessing of Miguel Depedro’s Tigerbeat6 label and glowing praise from Northampton’s own Sonic Youth. Either the album was carefully constructed with hours of studio time to finely tune so that it sounds like it was cluttered together to sound as messy as they wanted it to be, or the album was sincerely assembled in little more than that 25-minute playing length as part of an almost impromptu jam session. Even if one were to believe the former, that does not make a good album.
This cluster bomb of an album gurgles, jitters, shrieks like a banshee, and hurls about like it was trapped inside of a straight jacket. None of the 14 tracks, four of which are untitled, one of which is a minute of Cage-ian silence, are radio friendly, or listener friendly for that matter. One can imagine the spills and thrills of seeing such an exuberant and decadently ungraceful band perform this material live. Even a casual listener would probably note that much of that live energy has been lost in the translation to disc, though the scattershot percussion, brass, keyboards, and yelping are still somewhat magnanimously reproduced. The hysterical aura of this album expunges all formalist ties to structured music, subsequently wiping away classifications with its closest kin; grindcore. The Deerhoof via Sun Ra versus Hugh Le Caine aesthetic can be a gorgeously cacophonous one when executed properly and Total Shutdown often does do justice to the anarchy.
There’s a problem though. A band already pulled this shtick off over 10 years ago. This would hardly be a sin if it were simply some obscure relic of a time not ready for their deranged musical chokings and regurgitations, but The Boredoms have hardly been a footnote in the history of music. The Japanese noisemakers not only revolutionized hardcore. They became ubiquitous in the American experimental underground. They toured Lollapalooza, for Christ’s sake.
The fact that The Boredoms did it first is certainly not an excuse to discontinue their hyperbolic style of detuned composition, especially since the band has temporarily split and their last few albums were filled with mellower, electronic-based noises. However, some of the multivocalist unintelligible low end slurs are so curiously similar to the death chants of “Yamatsuka Eye” that one wonders if Total Shutdown were channeling the mysteriously absent singer or perhaps using stolen Boredoms sessions tapes. The eponymous album even ends with an ambient piece played with reversed synth lines, recalling latter day Boredoms obsession with Kraut rock.
Apart from being the sonic equivalent of a Broadway musical about the life and times of The Boredoms, Total Shutdown’s album is an earful. If there once were lyrics, they were not meant to be heard. The liner notes do not include them and true to the traditions of grind, the vocalist need not articulate. Unlike many of their noisier contemporaries, Total Shutdown does not enlist the help of feedback, or many studio effects for that matter, to assemble their dissonant symphonies. Although guitars are made to sound disgustingly sludgy and moans pushed ominously into the distance on tracks like “Pond,” the sound is pretty straightforwardly pursued.
Though the aggressive stuff can get tedious (though not torturous), Total Shutdown wisely swings moods by inserting brief interludes of surprisingly delicate and minimalist keyboards between the intense tracks. “Ka Ka Ka,” “Golden Nail,” and the untitled final track all counterbalance the preceding excursions of violence by harnessing very simple, slow melodies that provide the Yang to an album of Yin that grabs and shakes the listener at every available opportunity.
The Tigerbeat6 roster that Total Shutdown has joined the ranks of drew international acclaim for their do-it-yourself ethos, mostly in the San Francisco laptop techno scene. The resulting output proved that kids nestled inside their computers could make music just as daring and innovative as the bigwig DJs with their herniating heaps of equipment. Total Shutdown certainly fall into the DIY mold, but their output seems like it could have equally landed within short-run local distribution if Tigerbeat6 did not have the good graces to pick them up. Singling this band out on their roster spotlights Total Shutdown as the hallmark of their scene, a task they may not be fit to fill just yet. Though Total Shutdown’s debut album is a wild, orgiastic, bipolar ride, it’s a familiar one that is missing the slobber and warm breath of five lunatics getting all sorts of weird in front of you.
