Why Patterns. These London-based purveyors of premium noise for the distinguished listener are back with their second album, the rather fittingly titled Screamers. It’s been three years since they assaulted the public’s listening holes with Regorgitorium, an album that was described as being “constructed with the sole goal of distressing and alienating their few remaining friends and family.” So where do you go from there? How do you follow up a debut like that? The answer is by taking all the best parts of that album and paring it down to the absolute essentials, rendering and distilling it till you’re left with not-quite 17 minutes of pure noise rock perfection.
Why Patterns are a three-piece made up of members from Wren and Warren Schoenbright, but definitely don’t sound quite like either of their former outfits on this album. With Screamers they’ve moved away from those sludgy roots that were still very much in evidence in their debut album, evolving, mutating, into something altogether harder and faster. If you’re into bands like the beautifully incomprehensible Lightning Bolt or you think that Primus‘ Les Claypool should have tried screaming a bit more and adding at least four or five more fuzz pedals to his bass, then Screamers is an album you should be excited for.
Where Regorgitorium was the musical equivalent of a Sunday afternoon stroll through the countryside, with tracks regularly clocking run times of over four minutes, Screamers is more like a desperate sprint as you’re chased by a masked, incoherently screaming, machete wielding psychopath. Opening track ‘After the Bullfight’ smashes into your eardrums with all the subtlety of an air raid siren, a cacophony of moaned lyrics, crashing drums and a bass tone that could charitably be described as “filthy”, and the album doesn’t pause for breath until the dying strains of final track ‘Buffons and Barrel Organs’, which is one that definitely needs to be heard through headphones for the proper deafening experience.
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Screamers is here for a good time, not a long time. The longest track on the album clocks in at a hair under three minutes, and most of the rest are sub two minutes. The title track is finished in less time than it takes to boil a kettle for a nice relaxing cup of tea, and the entire experience is over and done with in a little over sixteen minutes and change. There are post-rock tracks that are longer than this entire album. Hell, it’s shorter than half the songs in Tool’s back catalogue, but it could be argued that this is a good thing. Screamers is a perfectly formed album that doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.
It’s a gorgeous mess of sound and a real step up from Regorgitorium; an album that just gets better and better every time you listen.