Exit Group – Adverse Habitat
Due to many global factors, there’s an argument for humanity recently having entered a period of Adverse Habitat during which it will either learn to adapt and modify the environment – fight back, if you will – or, sadly, perish. Some groups are obviously at greater risk that others. Rousing an urgent riposte to the political part of this debate, and thus well into attempts to change the prevailing winds already, come Exit Group and their Neue Deutsche Welle-inspired, angry punk polemics.
Provocative song titles and sneering attacks on the “right wing holiday” duly follow, vocals reclaimed and barked out as if addressing some parallel universe Nuremberg rally. A combination of full-throttle agit-punk noise and brutal, buzzed-out electro, their music is bleaker still. A deadly one-two comprising “Plastic Coffin” and “The Butcher” does much of the damage early on, the former deploying an early post-punk churn, choppy guitar and maniacal sci-fi FX that makes it a series of sharp explosions rather than a single retro-futuristic wave, while the latter rolls around in punishing bass work and metallic guitar parts that slice like a rusty garrotte.
Restless, robotic rhythms begin to dominate, haywire synth scrawling away like keys on a cyborg’s paintwork. Replicants full of tics and incandescent rage, instrumental “collages” chatter in between like registry malfunctions. Throaty bass becomes the album’s backbone while clattering drum patterns mimic being thrown down the stairs and atonal guitar angles belie some of the line-up’s time served in Useless Eaters. Together they create an antisocial but impressively tight herky jerk that’s both paranoid and uncomfortable to endure in long sittings. An austerity-brand electro-punk mess, Adverse Habitat is nothing then if not an awkward creature made of its surroundings.
Best track: “Plastic Coffin”
~Adverse Habitat is released October 12th 2018 via Castle Face.~