Colossamite
Economy Of Motion

THE REVIEW

If you see the four Colossamite members, you might think you've stumbled upon the wrong band. They look like four thirty-something nerds forced to wear glasses from too much jerking off; it's impossible that they could have produced an album like this.

Three guitarists busy making you believe they're creating an infernal racket and a drummer who seems to be playing at his own rhythms and no one else's. And yet, you need a good shovel-shaped ear and to dig beneath the tons of noise to discover that Ed Rodriguez ruined his eyesight spending nights on the staff weaving unthinkable chords and refined arpeggios.

Then he needs the guitars of the other two to create a sonic clash from which it's hard to escape without a four-month stay in the trauma ward. Add to this the insane and desperate voice of the overweight Nick Sakes, former guitarist of the dissolved sonic terrorists Dazzling Killmen (some of whom ended up in the orbit of none other than Jim O'Rourke), who in some tracks leads the sonic assault like the legendary Yamatsuka Eye of John Zorn's Naked City.

This is "Economy of Motion," the apocalypse directly from Minneapolis, year 1998.

It's Captain Beefheart gone mad being ravished by the guitars in "Mr. Somebody does Something," the desperate melodrama of the invocation "Pee Dio," the three experimental minutes (still in the year 2000?) of the noise combustion of a heart stuffed with pacemakers in "Heart vs. Temperature," it's the sudden calm before a promised storm that never actually arrives in "Busy Little Hands."

And yet it is the dissonant anger and love of absurd stories you wish you'd never known. Some have brought up names even quite distant from one another, the guitar work of Glenn Branca, the Japanese Zeni Geva, the Motorhead meeting King Crimson, and John Zorn himself.

It's hard to describe, you have to listen to it and then immediately throw it away.

Anyway, because it might make you sick, but it can also make you a slave, and we know well that dependencies can also be toxic.