Mincemeat Or Tenspeed / Drums Like Machine Guns – split – Badmaster Records [Album As Art #58]

Mincemeat Or Tenspeed / Drums Like Machine Guns - split - Badmaster Records

Mincemeat Or Tenspeed – “Circle Crazy”

Already one of my all-time favorite splits, the Mincemeat Or Tenspeed / Drums Like Machine Guns 12″ arrived at my doorstep last year and it was already way too late to hit Tiny Mix Tapes or the like, having been released in 2007, so I sort of sat on it. And it grew, and grew, and grew until I couldn’t ignore it any longer. So … HERE WE ARE! It’s got gorgeous collage art — and came out before the aesthetic became omnipresent — too, with reds and blues that jump out and cause they eye to contract a bit.

I’m a sucker for Mincemeat Or Tenspeed; I’ll get that right out in the open immediately. I think his mastery of mainline-audio hypnotism is much more than just a blip on a vast radar; I feel it’s important on several levels. It’s simple, sheared of all distractions … vital, virile, and pumped full of bass and blistering blasts of noise. It buzzes inside your head like it was there all along, subsisting in the back of the skull long after the last burp of static has SHOCKed your system. Empowering, deflowering, all-devouring, and with a recent cassette on Linear B and that full length on Zum Records not too far back, Mincemeat will gnaw away at your resistance like a rat (which is just how we like it around here, heh heh).

Drums Like Machine Guns’ side feels a bit like a continuation of what their counterpart was doing on his side, just with more layers to gawk at. Deep tom-tom thrusts (Aa, anyone?), scratchy, beyond-the-red noise, blurts of bass-snare, pounding drum-machine(gun) rhythms, rave-up sequences that murder IDM … think To Live & Shave In LA with more living and less shaving … this is murder music, plain and simple, so don’t wield it without taking the proper precautions.

Near the end of their side Drums Like Machine Guns go the scenic route, a faint flame of effects flickering and floating ear-high, squalls of pitch-bending high-end curling back, arching over you like a tidal wave and crashing down as you try and shield your loved ones. Then a drill-’n'-bass sequence hits, driving your head into the concrete and bursting its casing like a watermelon, POP!!>>!! Things get NOISy, charged, clumsy, distorted, sharpened and deadly. As I mentioned above, you’re not going to get out of this one so easy if you’re not of the learned — Indian Jewelry always tapped out long before reaching the extremes DLMG stoop to here. Same with others, though I would favorably place groups like Kid Spatula and Kid606 alongside the harder-edged influences evident (Wolf Eyes and their ilk, etc.) … Even Atari Teenage Riot/Alec Empire sort of rear their ugly, more-influential-than-many-give-them-credit-for heads …

The sharp execution of Drums’ side in no way pales in the glow of Mincemeat’s; in fact, the two feed off each other. This is probably sold out, but if not, snag it before something AWful and DREADful happens.