Review: Dethscalator - Racial Golf Course, No Bitches

Racial Golf Course, No Bitches has no cruise control. Even when it gathers speed – with singer Dan Chandler’s head flung out the window, hollering in a strange confusion of commanding ecstasy and paralysing fear – its movements are jerked and contorted, tugging power chords and snare punctuations out of joint and forever veering toward the precipice of collapse. So often the album slumps into disarray, with distortion hissing like leaking hydraulics and feedback announcing an internal CPU meltdown, and so often it re-emerges in a completely different shape, with its head situated where its legs used to be: choked funeral marches become high-speed noise rock chases, Neurosis-esque stomps of downtuning become gateways to warbling, drowning guitar solos. Dizzying doesn’t cover it.

In fact, that only consistent element of Dethscalator’s debut is its sheer weight. Guitars bare serrated teeth as well as muscular mid-range impact, swirling around the commotion (tunnels of delay, abused cymbals, malfunctioned guitar leads) that so often billows at the album’s centre. Even when the band cut back (as in the whirring, lost frequency interference of “Felt Leg”), intensity exists as a terrifying and imminent implication; a gigantic, mammoth-shaped void waiting to be filled by the twisted strings of barbed wire forever waiting in the wings. Its re-entry is ugly and gratifying simultaneously.