Forget music that makes you feel no pain. What about music that makes you feel like nothing at all, that pushes and pulverizes you until every woe, hope, and worry disappears like dust? That is the marvelous strength of Water Damage, an amorphous collective of about a dozen Austin underground heads whose high-volume indulgence in repetition is a force both obliterative and purifying. They ride the divide between noise and rock, pounding out rhythms like a power trio caught on an eternal trip to nowhere, all beneath feedback streaks and microtonal bleats. In New York in the late ’70s, the Ramones at CBGB inspired young composer and avant-impresario Rhys Chatham to repeat an electrified E above drums until the overtones turned into a fever dream, the vision fulfilled by his Guitar Trio. Nearly half a century later, Water Damage have turned that challenge into an obstacle course with In E, their third and best album and a reaffirming testament to just how ecstatic and mighty minimalism can be.
In E arrives as four side-long tracks, each charging down a single alleyway without ever wavering, glancing back, or bothering to do anything more than shift in barely perceptible ways. “Nice!” someone seems to yell 15 seconds into “Reel E,” the phosphorescent violin and colossal rhythm section presumably pausing just long enough to check the levels.
And then, their marathon begins, blown-out bass and brain-fried guitar unfolding like an imagined ocean. The drums fall in line like a marching band, at least two kits shaping an ironclad pocket. But the bristled violin of Mari Maurice Rubio—who records as the great more eaze—slices through the sides of the beat like she’s trying to make an escape. And that’s mostly where the piece hangs until the band breaks down and Maurice outlasts the rhythm long enough to sail into this open void. Loud, relentless, unrepentant: Lock into that tug of war, and you may forget where you are, how you are, who you are. It feels fantastic, a rare mind eraser for our increasingly plugged-in times.
Water Damage unlock the same effect on “Reel EE” and “Reel EEE” with very different approaches. For the former, the rhythm section summons a rock band that’s about to count in to their greatest hit, but they simply sit there, repeating the meter and doubling the bass until it all blurs into a trance. Don’t expect it to change when the guitars finally arrive, either, their slow wave of serrated tones washing over everything like insoluble oil. It is a web of interwoven drones, with feedback, distortion, and fragmented chords cohering into sustained chaos. “Can textures alone make a riff?” Water Damage seem to ask. The Motorik march compels you to nod along whether or not you agree.
“Reel EEE,” on the other hand, begins with the hum, its amplifier buzz and scraped strings slowly accreting into some demonic instrumental choir. Imagine Appalachia’s great Pelt, plugging in and zoning out. When at last the drums come, they swing like a GIF of someone dancing to disco on an endless loop. That beat bullies the layers apart, so that you can hear the collective hum’s individual threads—the plangent guitar, the shrieking violin, the plucked strings. Focus on any of them long enough, and again you’ll disappear, lost and locked inside a beautiful melee. When the tape runs out 15 minutes later, you may ask where the time has gone, maybe wonder if the clock itself has somehow skipped.
Water Damage, of course, are not the first band to muster these sorts of barrages. Whether their particular headwaters are somewhere in Germany at the start of the ’70s or in Memphis and the Delta below decades earlier, their path runs through the Grateful Dead and no wave, Load Records, and, more recently, 75 Dollar Bill. They nod to this lineage of proud cacophony with closer “Ladybird,” a demented 2005 opus of Austin-via-London project Shit and Shine. Much like Water Damage, Shit and Shine can expand and contract as needed, incorporating guests and stretching jams until last call. (Shit and Shine henchman Craig Clouse plays in USA/Mexico with Water Damage’s Nate Cross alongside King Coffey of another obvious antecedent, Butthole Surfers.)
And, again, much like Water Damage, Clouse once described Shit and Shine as “Repetition. Noise. A little humor.” As Water Damage near the end of their 20-minute romp through “Ladybird”—where distorted guitars surge through militant drums only to be swallowed up again, where the vocals sound like they’ve been trapped in a heat-warped spool of magnetic tape for decades—you hear that humor. This is gloriously absurd music, pushing rock ’n’ roll toward a threshold at which you either have to submit or simply walk away. Just go for it already.
In October 1972, Tony Conrad—the iconoclastic violinist who had helped name the Velvet Underground and helped give La Monte Young’s eternal music its theoretical underpinning—rendezvoused with the ever-mischievous Faust in Hamburg. Their session, Outside the Dream Syndicate, became a hypnotic classic, Conrad’s drone tunneling through the thrum like it a rusty razor blade. But Conrad often dismissed that record, saying they all sounded like hippies. That was especially damning for that moment, as the Vietnam War’s chthonic horrors reached new lows. The late Conrad might have loved Water Damage. On In E, they start from the same basic premise—put a big beat beneath a wild drone—and howl, offering none of the sense of safety or quarter Conrad must have heard in Outside the Dream Syndicate. Water Damage roar and rage against the troubles of our own time, their volume and power making you forget for at least 20 minutes at a clip. And then, they start again.
