Martin Rev’s first album in seven-plus years introduces itself with a blast of noise that’s bound to make even the most masochistic listeners leap for the volume button. Beyond abrasive, the sound throbs and quivers as layers of ear-piercing frequencies overlap for an excruciating 45 seconds. Let’s hope that military interrogators never get their hands on this piece of music, titled “Stickball,” because it’s by no means a stretch to say you could torture someone with it.
As co-founder of the venerated experimental duo Suicide, Rev is of course no stranger to challenging his audience. He is also clearly more than just a noisenik, having proven his ability to carve form out of chaos over and over since the early 1970s. There’s random noise and then there’s Rev’s brand of noise: “Stickball” is actually quite carefully arranged. The vague outline of a drum pattern begins to materialize within its wash of booming static, but it takes a special kind of perseverance to appreciate it.
Perhaps opening the album on an unlistenable note was Rev’s way of weeding people out, but it’s a curious decision. Demolition 9 contains some of Rev’s most straightforwardly musical work, and for most of its 34 tracks, Rev pulls back the curtain to reveal the composer that he is at heart. He did the same on his last album, 2009’s Stigmata (a heartfelt tribute to his late spouse), except there he stuck to an orchestral style. With Demolition 9, Rev runs free across a dizzying grab bag of genres.
Try to ingest this album in a single sitting and you might literally find yourself dizzy from its nonstop hairpin turns. “Stickball” leads into the gentle choral stylings of “Salve Dominus”—a piece that couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to what came before it, and the first of many examples where Rev makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he’s courting beautiful sounds. From there, he delves into new age, bossa nova, ambient soundscapes, traditional rock’n’roll, and more noise with a glee that approaches the zaniness of a cartoon score.
Rev’s playful streak is evident going all the way back to his eponymous 1980 solo debut. It was there in Suicide, too; it just wasn’t as easy to make out. If you watch recent live clips, he seems to relish his role as a kind of musical trickster figure. So it follows that some of the new album’s transitions are laugh-out-loud funny. And on tunes like “My Street,” Rev exposes how lighthearted his irreverence has become by playing a 1960s girl group-styled melody on a distorted guitar with a tone so cutting it sounds like a blowtorch. Imagine Phil Spector producing an early industrial/power electronics act.
There’s definitely a method to the madness here. And to be fair, at least half a dozen tracks showcase Rev’s unique gift for turning abrasion and spartan beats into art. But “Stickball” epitomizes this album’s central problem: the pattern in the noise never comes to fruition. Later, Rev reintroduces the same harsh tones on “Into the Blue,” basically a repeat of “Stickball” with a more defined live drumkit. But rather than letting the drums emerge gradually, Rev breaks the idea into two separate shards of glass, almost as if daring you to either step on them or steer clear.
Rev doesn’t give anything on this album time to develop; he simply introduces each motif and then drops it for the next idea. With most of the tracks clocking-in at under two minutes, Demolition 9 gets aimless and exhausting very quickly. It didn’t have to be that way. Had Rev taken some care to group the individual vignettes together by similarity of style, the music could have had an arc and played like a series of suites. Even the face-scraping “Stickball” could have felt rewarding with some proper setup.
Without any attention to flow, Demolition 9 sounds like a person rummaging through drawers, reading off unrelated pages from separate notebooks. The experience is not without its charms. Rev makes for a lovable eccentric, but at this point, he has nothing to prove by making his music more difficult than it needs to be. Hiding in the cracks of Demolition 9, there’s an album that speaks to Rev’s musical range. To find that album, though, listeners will have to come up with a coherent track sequence on their own.
