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The Skull Defekts<\/a> \u201c2013-3012\u201d Thrill Jockey<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n As on their album from earlier this year, Peer Amid<\/em>, The Skull Defekts are joined on this EP by Daniel Higgs on vocals.\u00a0 Higgs\u2019s fellow Lungfisher Asa Osborne also participates.<\/p>\n Here we have the product of a single day in the studio.\u00a0 Three songs, \u201cChildren of the Skull Defekts\u201d, \u201cBeyond Within\u201d, and \u201cEmbryo\u201d, comprise the first half of the album and on the B-side, those tracks run in reverse order.\u00a0 And in reverse.\u00a0 Yes, you heard me.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cI buried Paul\/Number Nine Number Nine Number Nine\u201d nonsense.\u00a0 The first two tracks make use of slow, metronomic rhythms and Higgs\u2019s excellent voice to create a powerful sense of menace.\u00a0 The repetition, in \u201cChildren of the Skull Defekts\u201d, of the words \u201cChildren of the children of the children of the children\u2026\u201d scratches at the skin while the music\u2014sharp and razoring guitars and steady rhythm\u2014does the same.\u00a0 \u201cBeyond Within\u201d, 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\u2019ve only heard a song a third as long.\u00a0 \u201cEmbryo\u201d is a strange love poem to, well, an embryo; its movement backwards into \u201cOyrbme\u201d effectively creates a two-part song of astonishing beauty.\u00a0 Fade-in turns to breathless fade-out, to the backwards pulse of \u201cNihtiw Dnoyeb\u201d, Higgs\u2019s lyrics bending backwards, voice twisting into new and exciting contortions, the guitars sounding in unsettling drones.\u00a0 The uncanniness of the backwards tracks lies in that they bear obvious relation to their forwards \u201coriginals\u201d.\u00a0 That sounds stupid, because the obvious relation is that they\u2019re the same damn tracks, but backwards; but the intelligence of this music is that there\u2019s more to it than that: the composition of each piece works in such a way that until you\u2019ve listened to its companion, you really haven\u2019t listened to it at all.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n
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