EXPERIMETAL
BY JOHN MULVEY
Water Damage
★★★★
Reel LE
LONGFORM EDITIONS. DL
37-minute meditative pummelling from Texan noise ritualists.
“Maximal Repetition Minimal Deviation” is the snappy MO of this Austin collective operating on the margins of rock and minimalism. Their latest release is 37 minutes of unrelenting mantric throb, as a Cro-Magnon riff cycles again and again – and again! – over the brawny groove. Beneath the brutalism, though, there’s a lot of gripping avant detail, not least Mari Maurice’s violin, which occasionally encourages the question: what would The Velvet Underground have sounded like if Tony Conrad, rather than John Cale, had hooked up with Lou Reed? Other guitar-based reference points might include Glenn Branca and Swans (drummer Thor Harris is an alum of the latter), but Water Damage mostly avoid the doomy signifiers which tend to coalesce around heavy drone, swinging their way towards a transcendental state that’s a rock analogue to the gnawa-infused post-jazz of Natural Information Society. Could be longer, obviously.