The Saturday Sound — Week 1
Blanck Mass — World Eater
By Gavin Dransfield
If you can imagine the noises that musical minimalism pioneer Steve Reich could come up with using an assortment of power tools and a chorus of synthesizers, all passing through overdrive filters at their peak level, you can probably imagine the atmosphere that drips from the busy movements and blunt force of World Eater, the third full-length album of Benjamin John Power, under his stage name Blanck Mass.
Much like Reich, Power too embraces a minimal structure to his songs, one that contrasts uniquely with the maximal and even abrasive sounds that inhabit that structure. You’ll have to lean in close to notice when and how each song builds, when and how each song falls, when and how each song introduces a new voice to its massive roster — but don’t lean in too close, because, if I could put it simply, this album is loud. Very loud.
Take the album’s second track, “Rhesus Negative,” for example. Closely following the eerie music-box trance of the introductory “John Doe’s Carnival of Error,” this 9-minute powerhouse instantly explodes the second it comes on, sending the listener’s ear headlong into a wall of industrial cacophony. With booming, cannon-like percussion, sharp swells of wiry synths, and the entrance of piercing, animalistic screams at the halfway point (which, if one listens closely, seem to resemble the words “LET GO, LET GO OF ME”), it’s a song that has a lot under its belt, and that boldly lays the groundwork for the immersive chaos of the album.
Next in line is the hypnotic “Please,” a significantly more melodic tune that begins gently and introduces its players one by one — a thinly distorted choir, echoing drum hits, warped vocal samples, to name a few — until it too expands into an awesome, pulsating apparatus of psychedelic sound. This track in particular feels like a living, breathing organism struggling to survive in a dying habitat. It sounds like a creature raising its hackles, baring its teeth, and growling at…something. And that something is, from my perspective, what this album attempts to warn its listener of.
From the upbeat and almost groovy “The Rat” to the urgent and aggressive “Silent Treatment,” the metamorphic soundscapes of “Minnesota / Eas Fors / Naked” to the epic and climactic “Hive Mind,” World Eater is a rich ecosystem of intelligently crafted, unflinchingly ominous, and powerfully jarring noise that seems to portray the desperation of life on the fringes of death. It’s an album whose true message can only be guessed at, but whose massive proportions will shake you to your core nonetheless. It’s an album that won’t just hold your attention, it will trap you in its jaws and refuse to let go, and therein is found, amid the harshness, a captivating and wholly unique kind of beauty.
Stream the album:
