If you were standing too close to them, you could have been severely injured. Neptune were crammed into the corner of Charlie's Kitchen in Cambridge, MA, ripping through a set of disgusting industrial post-punk, at once a tight, almost funky band and a piece of kinetic sculpture. Neptune aren't just another squad of noisy art-rockers-- they're a complete package, pulling up to venues in a psychedelic van painted with a giant merman (Neptune himself, one supposes), and emerging on stage (when the venue happens to have one) with unholy contraptions fashioned from scrap metal by guitarist/vocalist Jason Sidney Sanford. The drum sets are piles of oil cans, circular saw blades and assorted car parts, while the guitar and bass look more like medieval weaponry than traditional instruments.
And that night in Charlie's Kitchen, after already being flattened by Tyondai Braxton's bracing solo set, Neptune bassist Mark William Pearson was swaying wildly back and forth, the jagged prongs that jutted from the neck of his scrap bass mere inches from flaying the intrepid souls standing at the front of the crowd. It was quite an introduction, and it nearly goes without saying that duplicating the intensity of a live performance like that on a record is a tough proposition at best. But on Intimate Lightning, the Boston band's third full-length, they almost manage it. The short review is that it sounds exactly like what you'd expect a band that plays their songs on scrap metal to sound like.
The long review is a bit more complicated than that, but Neptune really do accurately approximate in their music the tragic and violent desolation of the auto graveyards from which they draw their raw materials. The fact that the guitar and bass are built from metal affects the timbre of the instruments, the bass sounding harsh, almost distorted, while the guitar rings with surprising clarity. Percussionists John Douglas Manson and Daniel Paul Boucher naturally sound like they're banging on archaic VCR casings, gutters and miter boxes, but they play their traps as though they were normal drum sets, with Boucher contributing occasional scrapings on a violinish contraption that's the most alien texture on the record. The cumulative effect of all this is a sound that's sort of familiar, but just off enough from a conventional arrangement to be disconcerting.
The songs are tightly wound nailbombs of rapidly shifting meters, clanging rhythms, and mathtacular start/stop passages designed for maximum sensory damage. Sanford's vocals are secondary, it seems, to the grotesque clatter surrounding them-- he whispers and growls squarely in the middle of the mix, perfectly content to let the pummeling grooves overwhelm his Dadaist lyrics. As such, the songs have little overt melodic content, but pretty melodies and pop sensibility are clearly beside the point when you're working in the same destructive tradition as fellow New England weirdos Lightning Bolt and Zealous Fuel.
It would be wrong to say that Neptune display a mastery of their craft, because in this context, the word "dominance" seems a lot more apropos than "mastery." Seriously, when the sick, militaristic groove of "Automatic" launches into its distorted reprise, there's no point in trying to resist; you just hunker down and let it roll over you like the sonic blitz it is. That night in Charlie's Kitchen, Neptune were more than dominant-- they were mesmerizing and seemingly omnipotent. Intimate Lightning can't compete with that, but it tries anyway, and it comes out brilliantly brutal for the effort.
