DEAFKIDS "Metaprogramacao"

DEAFKIDS

“Metaprogramação”

When I first experienced Brazil’s DEAFKIDS and their Configuração do Lamento album, it was a real revelation. This was a super-noisy, super-primtive industrial band with unbelievable percussion and rhythmic flow. Armageddon with an Afro-Caribbean beat. It was unlike anything I’d heard up to that point and I was really looking forward to the follow-up.

The sophomore curse has hit pretty hard with Metaprogramação. The noise has increased here to sometimes unbearable levels and the album seems to be a super-devolved stepdown from the previous disc. It sounds like the band has discovered delay effects and Dalek-like vocal tricks for the first time and run wild with them. A lot of the album is endlessly reverbed and delayed takes on “ooh-ooh-ooh”, “yaa-yaa-yaa” and “ugh-ugh-ugh” cycled through scrap metal while electronic pulses and simple beats predominate. Some of the noise here rivals Merzbow and crosses the pain threshold. Guitars are almost non-existent, but when they do pop up, they engage in ultra-primtive tribal riffs like on “Mente Bicameral”.

This is certainly designed to be painful and transgressive, but when it is also dull, it looses its flavor. The awesome Deafkids Latin drumming is still there and that saves this from being a total washout. Cuts like “Espirais da Locura” prove they can still deliver that thrilling percussion but wow, do you have to dive through a lot of tedious metallic roars to get there. The last album also had these traits but somehow the album just flowed better and pulled itself back from the brink. Metaprogramaçã dives into that brink and this is really not the same.

Still a lot of potential with Deafkids but I was disappointed with this one.

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DEAFKIDS