The Mover

Music's ability to convey and cause anxiety draws a lot from the anarchic properties of noise, but it's just as wrapped up in the subtle erotics of confinement. No genre fetishizes limitations quite like techno, which embodies the frozen feeling of modern life with a hard-line formula whose strictures nonetheless proffer secrets through their in-between spaces. And no techno artist fetishizes limitations quite like The Mover, a longtime champion of the brutal bash that gives gabba its repulsive rub and masochistic allure. A bit more restrained than Mover-produced gloomcore classics that trace back to late-'80s Germany, Frontal Frustration makes an uneasy game of luring listeners into a sound that aggressively pushes them out. With its ceaseless four-four skulk and menacing mess of sonic weaponry, the album charts a moody stomp that alternates between a numbing moan and a visceral rush. "Down Deep And Cold" tears its uniformity neatly down its seams, employing a mix of seething rage and numbed resignation that plays out in tracks with telltale titles like "Voodoom," "Worship The End," "From A Lobotomized Mind," and "No Next Day." All the more complicated for their deceiving simplicity, The Mover's hyper-agitated mantras work much like those of Lightning Bolt, a Rhode Island art-punk duo whose confinement bleeds through its borders while flailing within them. Made with just drums and heavily processed bass, Wonderful Rainbow cooks up a ferocious din that's equal parts noisy nihilism and curiously swinging anti-funk. High points like "Assassins" and "Dracula Mountain" blare and blurt while cinching their stroboscopic squeeze ever tighter, starting with an explosive climax and stretching it out to disorienting effect. For an album that changes pace only for intensely noisy noodling, Wonderful Rainbow shows remarkable range, thanks to "talking drums" that fit the clamor into a strange sort of grammar. Merciless in its fury, the disc works like a purgative kind of drone music, transposing meditation's internal pull with a writhing external push that serves ends and beginnings just the same.