The Skull Defekts “2013-3012” Thrill Jockey

As on their album from earlier this year, Peer Amid, The Skull Defekts are joined on this EP by Daniel Higgs on vocals.  Higgs’s fellow Lungfisher Asa Osborne also participates.

Here we have the product of a single day in the studio.  Three songs, “Children of the Skull Defekts”, “Beyond Within”, and “Embryo”, comprise the first half of the album and on the B-side, those tracks run in reverse order.  And in reverse.  Yes, you heard me.

Now: The Skull Defekts transform what sounds on paper (on pixellated screen) like a gimmick into something way more beguiling than just a bunch of songs playing backwards, or some “I buried Paul/Number Nine Number Nine Number Nine” nonsense.  The first two tracks make use of slow, metronomic rhythms and Higgs’s excellent voice to create a powerful sense of menace.  The repetition, in “Children of the Skull Defekts”, of the words “Children of the children of the children of the children…” scratches at the skin while the music—sharp and razoring guitars and steady rhythm—does the same.  “Beyond Within”, over nine and a half minutes of steady pulse again mixes vocal and instrumental performance with enough intricacy to engage your ears and brain and speed time up and make you think you’ve only heard a song a third as long.  “Embryo” is a strange love poem to, well, an embryo; its movement backwards into “Oyrbme” effectively creates a two-part song of astonishing beauty.  Fade-in turns to breathless fade-out, to the backwards pulse of “Nihtiw Dnoyeb”, Higgs’s lyrics bending backwards, voice twisting into new and exciting contortions, the guitars sounding in unsettling drones.  The uncanniness of the backwards tracks lies in that they bear obvious relation to their forwards “originals”.  That sounds stupid, because the obvious relation is that they’re the same damn tracks, but backwards; but the intelligence of this music is that there’s more to it than that: the composition of each piece works in such a way that until you’ve listened to its companion, you really haven’t listened to it at all.

In fact, that last statement goes for the whole album: you have to listen to the whole thing, and you want to listen to the whole thing, because for thirty-five minutes six musicians grab your brain by the ears and open it to the possibilities for joy, menace and beauty that only music can create in simultaneity.