{"id":201,"date":"2012-03-08T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T09:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/douglascowie.com\/?p=201"},"modified":"2012-03-07T11:45:04","modified_gmt":"2012-03-07T11:45:04","slug":"music-review-white-hills-frying-on-this-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/?p=201","title":{"rendered":"Music Review: White Hills “Frying on this Rock”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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White Hills<\/a> Frying on this Rock<\/em> Thrill Jockey<\/a><\/p>\n

A well-intentioned coworker once gave me a book that explained all the reasons rock music was satanic.\u00a0 According to this tome, the primary features of rock that the devil uses to lure humans into his trap are the heavy beat and the repetitiveness of the music in general, and that beat in particular.<\/p>\n

White Hills are Satan\u2019s minions.\u00a0 \u201cFrying on this Rock\u201d announces its intentions right from the beginning: big guitar sounds, big, heavy drum beat, lots of cymbals, a driving and syncopated bassline.\u00a0 Whoop!\u00a0 Scatteredworldspadsoflight!\u00a0 Big! Fun! Swirling guitars!<\/p>\n

But then \u201cRobot Stomp\u201d comes in, with twelve minutes of metronymic pounding in common time.\u00a0 It grabs your ears and forces you into submission, the robots stomping your brains out with a snare drum on every single two and four of every single measure (and some of the ones and threes), not to mention the pulsing guitars, a zillion other sounds, and some B-movie soundtracking as we hit the last several minutes.\u00a0 It makes you feel a little strange, a little bit ill, and you might want to turn it off, but it won\u2019t let you tear your weak human mind from its robotic march.\u00a0 Robot.\u00a0 Robot.\u00a0 Robot.\u00a0 Robot.\u00a0 Satan.\u00a0 Satan.\u00a0 Satan.\u00a0 Satan.\u00a0 Stomp on my neck until I\u2019m your slave, my robot overlords.<\/p>\n

\u201cRobot Stomp\u201d gives way to the big swaggery blues-metal riff of \u201cYou Dream You See,\u201d which shows that White Hills don\u2019t just pound you into submission with incessant right jabs: they\u2019ve got the full arsenal to beat you with.\u00a0 They swagger, they pound, they beguile, they swirl, they wash your whole damn corpse with wave after wave of guitar.\u00a0 For a couple minutes of \u201cSong of Everything\u201d the jet fuel runs out and everybody freefloats around in a slow psychedlic vacuum, but those voices phasing across your speakers, and the wind sweeping with them, let you know that the bassline is going to build and build and build and build and\u2014<\/p>\n

\u201cFrying on this Rock\u201d has five songs to pound you through forty-five minutes of your life.\u00a0 It is an album for people who like to be pummeled to death by big noisy space rock.\u00a0 When the album ends, the silence is deafening.<\/p>\n

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