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STRANGERS
Many bands are lauded as being hard-working. The truth is perhaps that it’s an easy adjective to give a band whose main approach to music isn’t centered on Myspace bulletin usage. But to be hard-working in STRANGERS’ case means far more. Having already released last year’s acclaimed album, Weight; it might have been easy for the band to rest on its release. Instead, STRANGERS toured Australia and New Zealand again, began recording, and produced Night Minutes.
Where some critics saw some amount of beauty in the sonic textures of the Weight album; Night Minutes seems far more centered on a distinct ugliness – its artwork stark and minimal, its lyrics sarcastic and snide, and its music abrasive and relentless. From the jarring opening stop-start of ‘Voyeur’, STRANGERS provide thirteen minutes of pounding punk-influenced rock. Whilst there are nods to the metallic crunch of Entombed or Neurosis, one can hear a sly 80’s hardcore influence creeping in alongside the musical cynicism of bands like Big Black, Swans and The Jesus Lizard. While ‘Knots’ shows the band at their most frantic – speeding through a minute and a half of discordant hardcore; tracks like ‘Suck & Burn’ provide new scope for experimentation with post-punk rhythms. If anything, Night Minutes could be considered as an attempt to depict human indecency in its barest form – brutish, explosive but ultimately liberated.
The album was recorded and mixed with Troy Kelly at STL Audio in Wellington and mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, ISIS, Pelican, OLD).
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