Sometimes bands take their names from highbrow sources: Bauhaus from the architectural school, Art of Noise from the Futurist manifesto, Birthday Party from the Pinter play, the Fall from Camus, Scritti Politti from Gramsci, Genesis from Sega. Sadly the stories behind the juicy lowbrow names are mostly apocryphal. They must have dirty minds in Manchester, because no, 10cc weren't christened in honor of their superior ejaculation volume, nor were the Buzzcocks a sly reference to bus-driver erections. Smegma, however, can refer to only one thing.
It was a perfectly grotesque match, the name and the band. When a cluster of (then) Los Angeles artistes banded together against the fascism we now call prog-rock, they needed something that captured their viscous, out-there brand of soundclash. They went for the Yes fan's jugular. Hence Smegma. Now considered one of the, well, seminal stars in noise rock, thanks to some hip revisionism, the band has also become one of the scene's most-wanted collaborators. Hence this record, Endless Coast, created with Norway's Jazkamer, alias John Hegre and Lasse Marhaug, who enlist here the bass-synth thuggery of No Fun's Carlos Giffoni.
Offering sanctuary from the glossy concision of verse-chorus-verse-- from all of pop's commandments and borders-- noise music can easily tip over into concept art. Jazkamer and Smegma walk this line with studied gracelessness. Taking cues from free jazz, they roam and dart, instead of adopting the sublime brutality of noise. The title "Heavy Fog" captures the mood and texture of this expertly conceived opener. A quick listen reveals 12 minutes of amorphous, foreboding haze, though a deeper study begins to grab at something like structure. All-over clatter gives way to Giffoni's waves of low-end rumble, setting the stage for the messy, wedding-cake compositions to follow.
Layer upon layer of instrumental and incidental noise seep together-- overheard clauses, cuckoo clocks, film-noir horn samples, the buzz and zap of synthesizers, a radio failing to find a frequency-- before everything settles down halfway into the track. This is the first purge. The next moment we hear a steady knock, then frenzies of drumming and wintry gales of noise as the song aggressively builds up again, before a second purge. The cacophony purifies nearly into white noise, inflected with a hum and screech of brass: off-white noise.
The tiered squall of "Heavy Fog" vanishes into the halting, stop-start logic of "White Witch". Beginning with an identical atmosphere of distorted rattling, the song draws toward silence before rebooting into a second movement, where we catch flashes of a manipulated human voice, and an exhausting, exhausted final movement, suggesting both a sputtering engine and battering ram.
The album sags only slightly after the midpoint. "Portland Swamps" adds up to little more than a simple sum of its parts: humming, a steady chug, whirls and whistles. A continuous tone unites the loose pieces, which after settling down, fade into a sewing-machine pulse and nature sounds that, poking into higher registers, recall seagulls or dolphins. Is "Stone Eater" about the Rockbiter from The Neverending Story? It's just frivolous enough. Heavy on distorted vocals, which slowly devolve into unpleasant, subhuman squirts-- like Jabba the Hutt talking in his sleep, or slowly choking to death-- there is certainly a monstrous presence here. The rest of the composition, a whiny synth twirling above rustling cymbals, stops short of resolving the question.
Deeply satisfying and enigmatically misspelled, "Carniviorous Bog" plays with the listener. Could this really be a rustic piece? The curling flutes, the songbirds trick us into entertaining the possibility. Soon technology careens in, right on cue, the sound of a peeling-out muscle car and thunderous drums shattering the peace, while a lone high note hangs like a dust cloud over the chaos. Bits of sped-up, prelingual mumbling appear and disappear. Then a fiery blaze of distortion and eerie tones ramps up the drama again, before a human voice wanders back in, faintly ethnic ululating and then what sounds like recorded newscasts. A steady cymbal rush cuts off the jabber, clearing the space for a bittersweet surf-rock coda, a groove that the Ventures could have dashed off, that dissolves into whooshing radio static, like a man into the ocean.
The psychedelic M.O. of Smegma-- the katana-sharp angles, acoustic whimsy, the Trout Mask replications, Dadaist sound-poetry-- never fades from visibility. But Endless Coast finds the laptop vandals Jazkamer and Giffoni brilliantly insinuated into the picture. To Smegma's surreal splotches and random gestures, they add a glacial, futuristic precision to the canvas, tracing and echoing the old band's manic gestures. It means that, amorphous as Endless Coast may be, the fury is always controlled and the chaos never fully surrenders its coherence.
