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A Fail Association – Yellow Pearl
Not your mother's Fail Association. At least, that's what she said. Today, there's more, much more. More study. More control. More authority. More care in the plotting of course, and staying it. That it would utterly fail in failing the 'holes their requisite riiiiiiiiipping, well, need barely go with saying.
A partial rewind may be in order. Let's go back, waaay back to, what was it, uh, July 2018. In them days did drop a live-to-tape session dubbed Less Than Approval. Of this, well, the sorts of harsh purity only a motherFUCKING noiseperv would love. This were the first outing for the Association, after a rather lengthy hiatus. Observe if you will the quaking hand, clearly itching to plug in, go nuts. Indulge, too a few secs of room acoustics, sucking up essential fuels to feed fires. And then: twenty-straight-minutes of heaving, textural, blurt. Crumpled thunder, crunched out bludger. Full frontal physicality, agile, dynamic. Punishing. The hand lightning quick, squeezing hard, choking. Little breathing space, little more than concentrated flatulent hogsnort. Smattering of screech-nasties to squeal out the flip-side. For the greater part, though, marginally hinged, ugly-as-fuck, blown out, bludgeon fest.
Yellow Pearl, on the other hand, is quite the measured and delicate affair, showcase proper of the Association's ample charms. In the opening ditty, a title track consuming the whole of a c30 side, electrified fever buzz sets attentions alight. Then the dropping of a certifiably ridiculous rhythmic loop stutter. Whaaaa-thoomp. Whaaaa-thoomp. Whaaaa-thoomp. Whaaaa- Brrrreeeuughgh! Brilliant start whereby listener is inclined to question not just the sanity of the person responsible but the sanity of sitting dutifully through it. Cut now to extended high end squeal as distant FM drops into, into...wait for it... DEATH. Black, blackened death. Dead on the outside, dead on the inside. Dead. Dead. Dead. Fucking demised, alright? Seriously some seriously heavy suffocating chunder, dense, crushing, unyielding. Through the dead calm, erratic bleed of white-sheeted stab, and wash, but nothing sufficient to penetrate the pulverizing pressures.
Pause.
Burly bulging thunder-bludger laying it on thick. Call it what it is, walls of barely penetrable crunch, ghostly whiteout shimmering around the edges, insinuating into cracks, whinging, seething, wheezing, attempting to bring the whole fucking thing down, harrrd. Florescent flashes of yellow, white, red, daylight cracking through, occasionally threatening to blind. Considered and controlled, sure, but the feeling of fleet-footed fucker feeling out the psyche-tinged possibilities at ultra-torqued extremities.
Flip the tape over and a live track recorded in HCTX 4/04/19. Here that same consideration and control, but more in thrall to the psychedelic rush, echoing flashes of the Association's white-hot contribution to the 7inch split with TEF (White Centipeded Noise). Seriously, was this recorded live? It is a stunner, pure fire, over, out. The sort of thing one might attempt under the influence of a Hiroshi Hasegawa or two, but edging toward more puritanical salivations, the white heat simply blinding, blistering, sufficient to render in an audience of taste mute, slack-jawed, genuflection.
With barely a pause, the final studio number, All The Way Down, but a better title would have been All The Way Up, reaching for the heavens, the skies, repeatedly slamming back down as each shriek-peak slakes its zenith. This, well, this is the Fail Association the aforesaid mother would recognize, at least as far as the apparent commitment to upper-ended, slathering, blistern-ment, erratic slippety-slops ratcheting up the scorch-levels. Still even here, in this brevity, the sense of studied control. Whitened sheets jabber against hailstorms of oversize ice-shards, shattered teeth grinning through alternately fractured, crystalline, dystopias. Clearly the hiatus has not been without its merits. One can but dream to fail this harrd.
Digest spew
Dead on the outside. Dead on the inside. But raging, all over, with unspeakably intense fire. Never before has the Association sounded so assured and in control. So learned in the projection of passions both suffocating and seething. From the most heavily weighted dead-calm bludgeon through to white-sheeted psych-tinged scathe. With a good dose or two of semi-erratic white-sheeted blistern-ment. Multi-faceted lesson in HARSH, fractured, smothered, rrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.
