Lasse Marhaug

Back in 2006, Lasse Marhaug released an album with Joachim Nordwall from the Skull Defekts and Johannes Helden called When The Ice Is Leaving, Scandinavia Is Burning. With a title like that, the album should have been all fire and brimstone of Nordic noise: abusive, throttling, and demonic. It was not. Instead, that was the album you would expect from an album called The Quiet North; and The Quiet North is certainly not quiet. Pure brutalist noise is what Marhaug has in store for us. This wall of obsessive, oppressive distortion comes by way of guitar, various effects pedals, and various pieces of metal to tremendous effect. This is not a subtle record, the various squalls from the guitar strings being grabbed with bloody fingers and scraped with those pieces of metal have the crazed wall-of-sound frenzy you could hear in any number of Matthew Bower productions setting upon a rumbled low-to-mid range distortion that comes across like a two ton pile of gravel being slowly dumped upon the roof of a tin shed. The album begins with a bang and does not let up until its abrupt conclusion some 30 minutes later. Exhilarating to say the least. (Aquarius)