If the music found here feels like it is the sort of thing that would come oozing out of a “damp, dimly lit space more akin to a post-apocalyptic shelter,” that is because that is precisely the environment that Remit wrote it in.
As “Are You Compliant?” opens up their debut album, Questions Unanswered, a snarling, sneering, and accusatory salvo of raw guitars and razor-sharp riffs, ticking, time-bomb percussion, and squalling sonic attacks, you realize that you are not in for an easy ride. But who needs that anyway? Not me, and certainly not Remit.
And from here they run roughshod, in the most creative of ways, across a seering, bombed-out post-punk landscape. “Debunker” is a dark, staccato groove, hints of Killing Joke’s early days with no shortage of beguiling electronic squalls and squiggles burrowing through the song and “Good Friends” has that same anthemic quality of the more commercial period of Simple Minds, ….just a little slower…and slightly gothed out.
Things end with Posthuman, a more instantly infectious piece, but still full of energetic and agitated textures. Not that there is anything wrong with their more usual, more challenging tracks, it’s just that if they were ever going to make an assault on the mainstream, this would be the Trojan horse that would get them past the gates.
It’s a howl from the underground, a battle cry full of dark and delicious poetics; it is music forged of heartbreak and a feeling that the world humans have created for ourselves is now far from suitable for us, that our fascination with artificial intelligence and unbounded progress has made us a slave to it.
The bleak and beautiful waltzing in harmony on the last dance floor before the end of time. (Or something like that, only using less pretentious language.)
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