Single Review: Other Rooms Feat. Yuko Miyoshi

Swallow The Rat are back with a new single in time for their NZ tour (with Ripship in support, which makes a lot of musical sense to me), where they have also brought in Yuko Miyoshi of Memory Foam who provides additional lead vocals. This is a tough one to listen to, almost as if Can have been invited to a Stooges gig, and they have decided to fuzzily distort everything, bringing in additional instruments to create a carpet of sound for the vocals to rest on. There is nothing clean here, everything bleeds into everything else, and any sense of space has been distorted which makes this both intense and cloying, taking the breath and life out of everything, removing all colour so that all exists is the noise. Punk, avant-garde, noise, experimental, it is all these things and more, and possibly less.

If ever a performance was designed to provoke a reaction, then this is it, and the first time I played the first few bars I literally had my head in my hands asking, “Why me?”. By the end of the third time of playing I realised there was a great deal of depth and reality within this, so much so than most of the music one comes across in the popular charts, and only a few more found me really enjoying it. This is the only song I have heard by these guys, but if the rest of the material follows a similar vein, then their concerts must be something else. Sonically deep in the red this will not be for everyone, but for those who appreciate this style then this needs to be played on 11.