Aside from a few leftfield fetishists like Abiku, Philly robo-blasters Genghis Tron don't have many stylistic confidantes. And for better or worse, dudes stick religiously to their script on three EPs and one full-length for Crucial Blast-– each an elemental gush of drumerless pixel-skree, nothing more, nothing less. Which is all just to say that GT have always seemed pretty comfortable in their own tiny, claustrophobic box. So it's kind of cute they've dubbed their Relapse debut Board Up the House.
But take a minute to figure out what Mookie Singerman is hollering about (hint: it's in the booklet), and the album title takes on a bit more than half-jokey overtones. At its core, House is a record about the psychology of claustrophobia, about feeling uncomfortable in that tiny box this band calls home. Here, characters are trapped in horrible lives, hiding from endless wars, boarding themselves up in houses and eventually, NSFW, rotting to death (check the album-opener).
Overtaken by the same sort of cabin fever that sacked Singerman's pen, guitarist Hamilton Jordan and keyboardist Michael Sochynsky are doing the unthinkable this time out: they're writing conventional(-ish) songs. With verses and choruses and codas, even. Hard to believe, but from the House's first blow, the frenzied clutter of Dead Mountain Mouth gets packed into something much more focused, even refined. It's a sort of distilled clatter that forgoes the few dozen weedles of "The Folding Road" or the electro-grind mish-mash of Cloak of Love standout "Arms", for a handful of fat, gnarled riffs, some mega-huge Kurt Ballou guitar sounds, and a whole lotta order.
Sure, "The Feast" is still a wild Agoraphobic Nosebleeder, getting by on the strength of the epileptic fits that won these guys the love of Relapse. But often the new, slightly more restrained Tron is capable of melding its poles-– the coarse grinds and the smooth electronics-– in much more convincing, cohesive ways. Take, for instance, the methodical beatdown of "City on a Hill", a track that relies on dynamic building blocks (blastbeat, keyboard patch, blastbeat and keyboard, keyboard patch, sputtering outro) over sheer force to achieve the same end result.
Obviously, though, a band this used to blowing its load for three-minute intervals is going to make a few missteps. The tepid Team Sleep syrup of "I Won't Come Back Alive" forgets what made their music compelling in the first place: the energy. Plus, it's about three minutes too long. And the NIN flatness of "Colony Collapse" doesn't do the song any favors. But when they're on, tracks like "Board Up the House" make the first compelling case for Singerman and company as actual songwriters. Yeah, the strongest moments on Mouth occasionally suggested it, but here Genghis Tron establishes once and for all there's more to their sound than Cephalic Carnage records and Atari Teenage Riot worship. And now that they're out of that pesky box, it's going to be pretty interesting to see where they wind up.
