Last heard from Jacob Felix Heule as the drummer in Street Priest, who made a terrific abrasive album for Humbler Records released in 2014. From same label, here’s the percussive Heule again now part of Beauty School, whose Residual Ugly (HUMBLER RECORDS HUMBLER-003) is an essential chunk of grisly, metalloid grunk-noise. He’s doing it with Matt Chandler, the bass player from Burmese, one of those bands I started checking out around ten years ago in the hopes of experiencing the sensation of thick concrete piled up around my head. Tom Djll, from Gross Abfahrt, adds live electronics and trumpet playing.
On balance, such a setup might promise the kind of inchoate rubbly din that usually ends up on the Public Eyesore label, but Beauty School have a tremendous amount of drive, purpose, and obnoxious force behind these 2014 performances, effectively transforming themselves into a tripartite human bulldozer of noise. “Music can be avoided…” is their hopeful boast, as they flail about in a spontaneous manner full of grim abandon. Heule’s metal contributions are everywhere…his percussive mayhem resembles wounded animals running amok in some ghastly inescapable zoo. Djll’s disgusting trumpet work, emerging like gaseous belches of pollution among the assorted metallic detritus, must also be singled out for praise; indeed the press notes claim this gives a patina of Electric Miles Davis to the project, admittedly only the “nasty” parts of those famed sprawling electronic-jazz workouts. Likewise Chandler’s bass guitar, which pretty much plays the role of the disgruntled bouncer at a New York night club flinging deadbeats out into the street; he uses the bass like a cattle prod, both on us and his fellow musicians, delivering electric shocks.
Grotesque and broken, but also very dynamic noise; no walls of harshness or leaning on reverb pedals allowed. From 7th April 2015, right up our alley.