Review: Remote Viewing ‘State Violence’
There’s no messing with this record’s title. Arriving with the PR foreshadowing of ‘their most direct statement yet’, it poses a distinct challenge.
For a moment I wondered whether Remote Viewing had made a sort of noise-sludge version of GNOD’s classic JUST SAY NO TO THE PSYCHO RIGHT-WING CAPITALIST FASCIST INDUSTRIAL DEATH MACHINE; however, State Violence sits both tighter and more sidewards to the politics.
Where previous albums have turned on uneasy images like A Dog In The Oven, here they are pointing a finger at the world that would let such things happen. This challenge was perhaps slightly deflected until now by a caustic edge of humour (hence my asking ‘Is it serious?’ when I reviewed Modern Addictions). Hearing such a direct statement from the band, it is clear that the feeling – and the craft – was always there.
And the craft is seriously impressive. That Remote Viewing have built a consistent and coherent sound from such volatile elements is an achievement. Each song seems close to chaos, but a careful listen shows intent in every change, progression and each use of repetition. With a characteristic hookworm twist, the music circles and burrows deeper – harmonically dense guitars providing a deceptively intricate bed for the percussive assault and vocals that wheel from vicious to forlorn.
It’s certainly uncompromising and confrontational, drawing from a broad, heavy palette spanning post-metal, noise-rock, sludge, and spikier territory. This is no art-school collage, however – these guys have been putting this sound together for years now. If there is refinement here, it is in their more developed use of ‘rare glimpses of beauty’. They overturn familiar tropes to tunnel back inside the distress and confusion of emotional and psychological states.
I once believed these experiences were universal. Surely, we all turn away, turn inward, and rage at times. With the perspective of age, I’m not so sure, but for those of us who do feel like this, there are few better articulations than the grimy puddles of these songs. Generously, the band offer to share space inside the feeling, and to let us scream out from inside it. How many invitations do you have in your week to do that?
With a characteristic hookworm twist, the music circles and burrows deeper…
How do we respond to the violence of the world? Listening to State Violence, it seems a common experience – the loop of refusal, collapse, shame, and rebellion that we navigate, and the cost of this in our minds and bodies. So no, despite the album’s resolute opening in the mode of noise-rock and post-hardcore, this isn’t a record I can write about in terms of genre signifiers. As they first try one form and then another, we hear the meaning bleeding out from behind the noise, pulling us always into the same murky space.
The much-missed Sonance had a collage of disconcerting medical videos involving eyes that used to accompany their set. Fair to say most people found this uncomfortable, yet it was somehow understood to be relevant to the expression. Bearing witness, we don’t want to look, but we have to, just as we see the silhouettes singing into each other’s mouths in Human Right$.
Looking so directly at the uncanny cracks in our world, State Violence brings to mind M. John Harrison’s novel Light – a book built on wounded minds trying to remain human, avoid isolation, and make sense of the future. ‘Eels. Like eels swimming away from me,’ says the narrative’s lead character Ed Chianese, interpreting a vision meant for another mind. Here, prophecy is delivered through pure human distress: a man biting his tongue, sick, and crawling away into liminal scrubland spaces.
I think that’s all that the head on a pole had to say, so I’ll sling the sack back over it and slip back into the roadside weeds.
Label: Human Worth
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Harry Holmes
