His love is a bulldozer, so he says in the title track. “The moon is failing in this broken sky,” he sings, his voice raspy and tired.
‘Too Far Across’ is a lover’s lament it too isn’t breakcore, it’s a deeply sad guitar song. Quivering strings and choral ensembles introduce a female voice imploring someone not to walk away. ‘Deleted Poems’ features no drums whatsoever. The strings, vocals, melancholy and confessional nature of the majority of songs all add to it being really quite a romantic album. I had to double-check my playlist hadn’t switched to shuffle by mistake. ‘8am Union Station’ is just under two minutes of beautiful flamenco style guitar, devoid of any kicks or breaks. ‘Amazon’ is probably his most straight-up breakcore tune on the album in terms of its structure, inexplicable samples, mad BPM and hoovers. Snares definitely keeps it real and deranged at points ‘I Was Born To Kiss Your Smiling Face’ starts off relaxed and keeps a regular minimal breakbeat with atmospheric piano plinks and plonks over the top – so far, nothing particularly out of the ordinary – but then the lyrics, “Girl, I was born to kiss your smiling face” are intermittently punctuated with an odd Nick Cave-esque scream of “WOAH”.
8BIT DRUMMER CREEP FULL
‘She Runs’ is almost euphoric, full of beautiful spacey melodic synth, the perfect midpoint track. Snares uses a pitched scream as an instrument which bubbles to the surface throughout the track. ‘1000 Years’ starts off slow and appears at first to be a love song, but soon descends into a mad mix of drums, pitched vocals and synth sounds, before rising and falling to introduce a short cello or violin solo. It’s slow and tense until the tempo changes, and the crunchy synth which permeates the track is supported by a swinging bassline, slowly increasing with sinister momentum until it suddenly explodes into his signature apocalyptic breaks. Creepy strings reminiscent of Rossz Csillag Alatt Született creep in along with shuffling drums, rattling snares, and haunting lyrics. ’10th Circle Of Winnipeg’ kicks the album off with atmospheric horror film style dripping sounds, the kind of foley reserved for Saw or Hostel. He’s up to his old tricks of strings in minor chords – and lyrics like “my world is broken in two tonight” sung by Snares himself adds a rare level of intimacy. It’s an album full of conflict angry, melancholy and hopeless in parts, but also full of love and confession, even a little bit of silly. Once you get over the fact it’s not groundbreaking, it’s great. There are elements of almost all his albums, which, as a fan, is great, but is also uncharacteristically unimaginative – though this could perhaps be down to the fact that he is releasing different styles of music under a number of different aliases.
He’s certainly not breaking any new ground with this album it is essentially a collaboration, in glorious strobing breakcore technicolour, of him, himself and him over the past ten years. According to Wikipedia, “caught between the two natures… Centaurs typify the struggle between civilization and barbarism.” Well, that’s pretty apt. The album cover depicts a gothic scene of Snares as a Centaur, naked and hairy, wearing an expression of innocent serenity. I can imagine he has a sign on his door: ALL MUSIC IS PRETENTIOUS, DON’T FALL FOR IT. He also stated that his influences are as diverse as bebop, Depeche Mode, Hindemith and Tchaikovsky, but revealed he listens to very little new stuff. But for someone who professes to dislike music – in a rare interview in The Quietus back in 2012 he was quoted as saying “much of the music I hear just sounds like someone’s ridiculous choices, based on their idea of what music should be… it gets really transparent” – he makes a lot of it. Apparently he once didn’t leave his house for 6 months. Well, to me, it all comes down to this mud pie thing, the mix of pitch-bended acid sounds, monstrous hoovers, time stretches, whatever miscellany of samples floats your boat, from porn to Béla Bartók, breaking up the peace and love of the amen break and playing with time signatures until you’ve got one big beautiful coagulation of chaos. “We’re all doing different shit, so why is it all breakcore?” mused Drop The Lime, back in 2006. You remember mud pies, the most disgusting mix of gruesomeness you could fit into whatever receptacle you had close to hand, mud and dirt and old cigarette butts, perhaps mixed together with a bit of mouldy apple juice – what is it that’s so satisfying about mixing up a whole lot of grim things and watching them coagulate?Īs a genre, breakcore is a tough one. At their most darkly atmospheric, his songs are a cross between a horror film and an auditory mud pie. My Love Is A Bulldozer is dark, beautifully chaotic, and cathartic.
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