One should be rightly suspicious of any band that names its own genre. These Are Powers' dubbed their sound "ghost-punk," and more than a few rock chroniclers have eaten it right up. But to be fair, there's something to the name. These Are Powers' late 2007 debut Terrific Seasons is propelled by the energy and anarchy of punk, to be sure, but there's something more mysterious lurking beneath the surface. Guitars emulate warping sheets of metal, and drums and vocals alike sound like they're bouncing off the walls of a cavernous abandoned warehouse. Couple these opposite poles of aggression and elusiveness, and sure, why not? "Ghost-punk" it is.
Yet as evocative and original a name as that may be, These Are Powers aren't exactly blazing a new path in modern music, and not just because the group recalls some of the tribal chaos of member Pat Noecker's former band Liars. While Liars casts a slight shadow over Terrific Seasons, the disc is most reminiscent of early Sonic Youth, when the skronky noise of No Wave, proto industrial music, musique concrète, ugly scum rock and avant garde experimentation collided and exploded like an underground Big Bang. Sonic Youth, Swans, PiL, Mars, even the Birthday Party-- it's all churning around in here.
That's hardly bad company, and it helps that These Are Powers largely make good on their borrowed legacy. "You Come With Nothing" kicks off the album in rousing fashion, with frenetic drums, throbbing bass, and caterwauling vocals coalescing into a condensed, ruthlessly efficient two-minute epic. "Makes Visible" is spookier and more hypnotic, while "Cracks in the Lifeline" makes good use of still more mysteriously sick sounds pulsing against the percussion.
The bursts of noise, screaming, skronk, and rhythmic terror are often as exhausting as they are exciting, which may or may not prepare you for the penultimate "Pizza Master Ice Cream Palace", a 20-minute monster that at times makes what came before it feel like a warm up. Heck, the ten-minutes of vertigo-inducing racket that conclude the track make the 10 minutes that came before that sound like a warm up, too, which is what happens when improv becomes such a key compositional asset. Once you get going there's no stopping the groove, and in fact even at their most discordant and disjointed, These Are Powers do groove.
By the time the twisted-metal (most likely) guitar of "Nubians on Franklin Avenue" kicks in to end the disc, it's clear that for all its familiar elements, These Are Powers has over the course of the album managed to scramble out from under the burden of comparison and establish an identity of its own. Yes, you can still hear all those other acts, but you can also hear the core trio of Noecker, Anna Barie and Bill Salas working hard to recombine those strands of post-punk DNA into a wonderfully ugly mutation, the kind you don't necessarily want to bump into in some dead end back alley but one which sounds more than satisfying ringing, clanging and resonating in the comfort of home.
