If you ever thought groove and experimentation were opposites on the music spectrum, ‘Arctic Anthill,’ the opener to Jaberdarwin’s debut, The Soft Collapse, would beg to differ. Yes, there is a lot of strangeness at work – creative, interesting, beguiling even – but wonderfully strange nonetheless, and all through the skittering drums and pulsing, meandering bass line share enough common ground to create a groove. Perhaps one that plays by its own rules, but as The Bard himself might have said, “a groove by any other name…”, well, you get the picture.
And while these six long, adventurous songs make for an eclectic album, this first track is a perfect statement of intent, running between fractured jazz intricacies and searing metallic highs, infectious rhythms and imposing sonic structures.
The title track, seemingly in response, is ambient and cinematic, at least for the first half of its existence, until punchy beats open the door to brooding gothic soundscapes, schizophrenic clarinets and the distant echo of buzzsaw guitars.
‘Skimism’ is initially built on drama and drive before collapsing into a spot of avant-gardening, gloopy liquidity, drifting space dream-pop, and then into a crashing, creative, crazy final act. And talking of final acts, ‘Tectonic Lullaby’ does indeed sound like music based on geological recordings of the almost imperceptible movement of the Earth’s plates, sped up a million times so that it coalesces into something the human senses can discern.
Whatever you are looking for in music, it is in here somewhere. It may be buried and bruised, deconstructed and deranged, melted and mangled into new forms, new paths, new genres, but it’s all in there somewhere. It is less music that has a problem fitting into genres; it’s more that, to some degree, it fits into all of them, making the whole idea of genres null and void.
