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(2022) Worriedaboutsatan - Bloodsport
Review:
How fitting for Gavin Miller to release his ninth studio album in a round metal tin when the music on Bloodsport is so industrial-strength. A hard case certainly makes sense for a CD whose material snarls and seethes. The release’s overall tone stands out all the more for following earlier releases that saw worriedaboutsatan opting for a more restrained if still macabre ambient presentation. Given the state of things, said shift would be easy to understand, even in the absence of Miller’s own statement, “You can’t live and make music in a bubble, and the way things are at the moment made it particularly difficult to give it a happy soundtrack.” Whereas another artist might respond to pandemic-imposed isolation with music marked by resignation, Miller’s crafted one oozing anger and energy. Bloodsport isn’t, however, an unrelenting doomfest: light occasionally breaks in (see the ascending, high-velocity closer “Apex Redditor”), and the cheeky track title “Sigourney Weaver Fanclub President” shows the album isn’t without humour. Produced at Miller’s home studio in Saltaire, Yorkshire, the forty-two-minute collection begins unthreateningly enough with “Je Suis Désolé,” but that brightly glimmering intro’s clearly the calm before the storm. A seamless segue takes us into “Bis Ich Komme,” a nine-minute dynamo that builds from a foreboding ambient throb into a pulsating workout inflamed by synth smears, chopped voice samples, and the prototypical fury of jungle breaks. In similar manner, “Sigourney Weaver Fanclub President” opens in atmospheric shoegaze mode until the addition of a lumbering beat pattern shrouds the ominous production in darkness. Miller moves into heaving, blustery electronica for the first part of “An Absolute Living Hell” before plunging headlong into grime-coated industrial for the nightmarish second, this one spiked by degraded bass figures and percussive clatter. In some ways, Bloodsport plays like a travelogue with stops at key genre check-points along the way, jungle and underground hip-hop among them. The outro of “Bis Ich Komme,” for example, could pass for a riff on “Come to Daddy”; the poisonous hip-hop bump of “Slur They Words,” on the other hand, wouldn’t sound out of place on Dabyre’s Two/Three. Quoting Miller again, he’s said of the album, “It’s a bit of a mess, but a grand one.” In truth, while it does range widely, Bloodsport is hardly the former; the latter description’s more accurate, however, in referencing the music’s power. The release isn’t noise, but it is the noisiest statement from worriedaboutsatan in some time.
Track List:
1.Je Suis Désolé 02:00
2.Bis Ich Komme 08:42
3.Sigourney Weaver Fanclub President 08:30
4.An Absolute Living Hell, Pt. 1 03:41
5.An Absolute Living Hell, Pt. 2 05:22
6.Perfekt 01:49
7.Slur They Words 04:38
8.Apex Redditor 06:56
Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
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