Death Pedals
Gonna balance out a band beginning with a band ending today. London’s Death Pedals have been steadily accruing accolades for their live shows over the past couple of years, but for their third and final LP they match the sweaty brutality under the lights with an experimental furor between the spools. Echoing the cave stomp gut punch of bands like Big Black, Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes, the band now works its way further down the Albini lineage to incorporate some sonic stretch into Shellac territory, rolling noise in a sonic simmer. It’s a bump up the ladder from their 2016 heart-pounder Meat House, but no worries pit dwellers, the eponymous swan song is still built on the same noise floor bedrock that chokeholds its way through their early works.
No shortage of noise crusted bashers out there, but when you do it right, the result winds up less gym-workout-background-track and more barely constrained chaos. The latter is decidedly the case for Death Pedals and if this is truly their sendoff, then it’s with a bit of sorrow that this record is received. It seems like this is the band just finding their mooring, balancing power with dynamics for an explosive record worth using to test your speakers’ limits.
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