Review: Love Sex Machine ‘Trve’
French four-piece Love Sex Machine tap into the vibration of the world with molasses-slow sensations, undulating with raw, primitive power that twists this perverted spiritualism into a nightmare narrative of nihilistic chaos, articulated by some of the most degenerately gleeful audio oblivion to spew forth from the Grande Nation.
Despite forming in 2009, the latest album marks only their third release following their self-titled debut in 2012 and second Asexual Anger in 2016. In that time, they have expanded on the Iron Monkey/Abominable Iron Sloth crunch of their debut and honed their blackened doom howl to create tracks that dripped with methodical and agonising aural torture. This zen-like contemplation on the art of crafting truly unsettling and lasting horror was like being dragged behind a truck at slow speed over a newly laid gravel road.
Finally, the band have sprung ‘a trap eight years in the making, one that’ll keep us strung up between a rock and a hard place so we can at least appreciate the view of the oncoming apocalypse’ in the form of Trve.
To truly appreciate Love Sex Machine you have to surrender yourself to the violent flotsam and jetsam that the band pull with them in the slipstream of their dark and malevolent sound. It is one thing to create the bleakest of slow-crawling music, it is another to infuse it with nuances that keep the constant bludgeon and percussive repetition from becoming overbearing. The righteous social commentary and wry humour they inject into their songs are as much a part of their DNA as the atmospheric tension that sees them named alongside bands such as Kowloon Walled City or White Mice for comparison.
FUCKING SNAKES opens the album with a deliciously murky, churning sound and pounding drums; the screeching feedback is joined by thrumming guitars that sound like angry buzzing insects before vocalist Yves rasping, spite-filled vocals join the fray.
The blackened chord progressions and scathing screams remind me of Death Mask era Lord Mantis and it should come as no surprise to find that the band recorded this themselves in collaboration with the master of the underground sonic psychosis Sanford Parker. The rhythmic, primal force coils like a snake as traces of discordant harmonies drift teasingly in and out of focus making the walls of sound dense and multi-faceted.
Guitar noises like warning alarms usher in TEST26 before the band shifts into a slower, more methodical start. Here the tumbling polyrhythms open the sound up to more expansive post-metal-influenced territory that offers a more surreal experience beyond the tumultuous filth. The vicious marching thump of the drums is unrelenting as the bass and guitar trade blows before dropping out as the vocals moan, almost Godflesh-like, before returning to visceral savagery, whilst underneath, the snarling cacophonous dirgy synth runs add melody to the dynamics filling out the cavern sound.
This album is a thirty-six-minute discourse in modern sludge that hits like a wrecking ball…
The muted strains of TRAPPED FOR LIFE continue the foray into post-metal drama giving the band an edge beyond mere sludge stomping. Slowly turning the screws until the vocals howl and writhe in disgust, the languid pace allows the lyrics to vary in delivery until the band charges off at a lumbering pace into a huge, seismic groove.
BODY PROBE starts with loose, twanging string bends that are reminiscent of Will Haven’s post-hardcore pummelling, combining the tribal drumming and bass-heavy lurch of Roots era Sepultura. The obnoxious, grimy delivery rages over cyclical riffing and vented lyrics that make the looping sound almost unbearable, catching the listener in a whirlpool of ultra-violence.
As the hailstorm of CANOPY builds around the opening chords allowing the bass and drums to wrestle for control, the vocals become multi-layered, pitching different techniques of screams that scrape across your brain like sandpaper on an open wound. Here the introduction of the subtle melodies makes the emotional delivery of the lyrics more pronounced and desperate before they return to a monstrously heavy ending segment.
The back end of the album feels more experimental in tone as tracks like BROKEN CODE and closer MASK work hard to augment their guttural delivery, making it more insidious by the former’s other world synth that layers the ringing guitar and heavy groove, or the industrial flavourings of the latter with glitching effects that end the album without fanfare.
Elsewhere CARBONIC BEAST (a callback perhaps to some of their more outlandish earlier titles) and HOLLYWOOD STORY have swing along with a variety of instrumentalisation that stops the remorseless hammering from becoming monotonous while AUTISM FACTOR takes the rattling black metal style cymbals and distortion soaked cynicism to more atonal levels.
Love Sex Machine are a band that revels in the David Lynchian philosophy of holding up a mirror to the dark underbelly of the world and allowing the horror of it to stare right back into its own face. Whilst it can be hard on the surface to decipher the biting lyrics given the deliberately twisted sound they generate, the feeling they are communicating resonates throughout Trve and it is little surprise that their work has drawn comparison to the likes of Amenra, LLNN or even their sadly departed label mates Herod.
Sludge metal can be a tough pill to swallow at times with seemingly few acts that can create sustained music that offers more than just metronomic debts owed to the likes of EyeHateGod where bands tread a circular path like the fabled oozlum bird. Introducing the elements of post-metal manages to keep these documentarians of societal malaise from ever reaching burnout, instead making something compelling and full of feeling. This album is a thirty-six-minute discourse in modern sludge that hits like a wrecking ball.
Label: Pelagic Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Mark Hunt-Bryden
