Lower Automation’s newest album, Strobe Light
Shadow Play, is an experimental, dissonant mishmash of noise rock,
hardcore, and mathcore. The music has such a sense of motion, of nervous
energy, sounds can seem like randomness overtaking the system. The band tests
and tries things, and the noise is barely contained—but it is not chaos. “It’s
the most experimental and noisiest release we’ve ever put out, but also
probably the most melodic,” the band says.
Among my favorite songs is “Information Entrepreneurs
and Their Lipsynching Choirs,” which opens with a piercing, shaky, manic vocal.
At 15 seconds, the buzzy bass buzzes into a punchy dance beat while the
distorted echo- and reverb-tweaked guitar bounces off the walls. Drums fritter
and snap out.
“Acolytic” opens with little discordant riff that
features a subtle lift at the end of each series of strokes. The bass rumbles
and yawns, and the drums motion frantically and then pause and punctuate a
desperately prayerful vocal. The energy grows, but then, at 1:25, the band
pulls back into a bad-attitude bass riff, the drum marking time more evenly
while the guitar still noisily sparks off around the room. The album captures
some very good moments, and this song is a great example.
Another exciting moment is the what-the-hell-is this?
opening to “End Scene”–a fast-picking classical guitar with softer emotive
singing. This gives way to noisy, raw hardcore—the guitar is nuts. At 1 minute,
cello strings sift from behind bass-drum hits before the song dives back into the
fray.
The songs are short, hovering around 2 minutes each,
and sound a little like The Locust with bits of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Botch,
and At the Drive-in. Strobe Light Shadow Play will be released
November 22nd via Zegema Beach Records. Lower Automation, a trio from Chicago,
has two previous releases—an EP titled Maps from 2016 and a
self-titled full-length from 2021.