There’s a chapter in Mark Barrowcliffe’s 2007 memoir The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange in which the author recounts the time in the late 70s when he stopped listening to punk-- the cool music of his native England at the time-- and got into Hawkwind instead. Hawkwind, so his teenaged self reasoned, was more conducive to his Dungeons & Dragons lifestyle and its fixation on all things mystic, cosmic, and denim-jacketed. Punk was about confrontation; Hawkwind was about escapism. At the same time, Barrowcliffe glosses over the basic irony: Many early punk bands, including the Stranglers and the Damned, were influenced by Hawkwind-- and Hawkwind could rage as ferociously as their punk cousins, even when singing about psychedelic warlords and space rituals.
For Destruction Unit, this is all so much false dichotomy. The Arizona collective’s sophomore album, Deep Trip, is spacey. And it’s punky. And it refuses to acknowledge that there’s anything remotely untoward about that particular alchemy of elements. Void, released earlier this year, showed glints of this shimmering space-punk alloy, but it hadn’t quite cohered and hardened. That’s understandable; although the band came together a decade ago, while frontman Ryan Rousseau was serving in the Reatards-- Jay Reatard and his Lost Sounds bandmate Alicja Trout were original members of D-Unit back then-- the group’s current lineup is relatively new. The scrambled, scratchy shakiness of Void has given way to a sound that’s far more focused, corralled, and even refined in its primal ergonomics of paranoia. Chaos abounds, but it’s been funneled into Deep Trip’s streamlined and astrodynamic pulse.
As pulses go, it’s still an erratic one. One of Rousseau’s strengths is knowing the difference between being spacey and being droning; although Deep Trip tracks such as “Slow Death Sounds” and “Final Flight” are brutally, brain-poundingly simple, their riffs don’t lapse into repetition for the sake of repetition. There’s some deceptively catchy and even classic songwriting going on, as one might expect from an ex-Reatard. Here, though, those caveman hooks are given an even more corroded crust of gunk, howl, and echo. On “Control the Light”, Rousseau gulps for air in some bug-eyed trance, like Lux Interior’s last gasp stuck in a near-death-experience loop. Grinding washes of wah pedal and modulated distortion evoke misanthropic freakouts and crises of pataphysical identity, and the low throb of motorik locomotion creeps in to calm the spasms.
The chemical formula is a familiar one to Hawkwind cultists. But “The World On Drugs” and “God Trip” are far less merciless in their cenophobic contemplation of the emptiness of space, both inner and outer. Rousseau and crew are shoveling noise like frantic androids to fill the void, a process of proto-industrial dehumanization that mirrors Chrome at their most savage and severe. But where Chrome-- and their closest contemporaries, Hawkwind-- skirted punk, Destruction Unit embraces it, sticking everything from garage slop to hardcore convulsion into its nihilistic nightmare fantasy. But in the same way Chrome and Hawkwind crafted eternal hymns to stellar and cellular entropy, Deep Trip is anything but fixed to any one time and place-- contemporary or retro. Even when the album infrequently dips into crooning, diffuse looseness on “The Holy Ghost”, there’s something more timelessly potent in the way D-Unit throttles the warp drive. If space-rock as a whole is a role-playing game, one in which its players imagine having front-row seats for the heat-death of the universe, then Deep Trip is the one of most advanced vehicles yet designed to take them there.
