Unsane
Swim

THE REVIEW

Buoyed by the latest (excellent) experimental de-review experiences, I venture into the mono-review, that is, the review of a single piece. Indeed, given the explosive nature of the sounds in question, it seems to me that "atomic review" is the most fitting description. Okay, it might also be a sneaky ploy to throw down some stories about a record already (excellently) databased without being accused of duplication, but probably this operation holds a glimmer of sense.
In the times of my more de-viated youth, I indeed developed an unhealthy veneration for track number 12 of "Scattered, Smothered & Covered", one of the explosive episodes from the house of Unsane. "Swim" is the name given to those 226 seconds that close the album and turn off the light.
Illegitimate and disowned sons of the Big Apple, the Insane have infested, disturbed the past decade, celebrating the baseness of the human soul with the most reckless of noises. They seem like 22 but are 3, guardians and scribes of the Memories from the Underground, singers of despair, bottled rage. Rage compressed in the relentless patterns of torn guitars, maniacal percussion, sublimated by Chris Spencer's delirious voice.
Let's call it noise, for instance, and then Unsane are negation, rejection of form but also of substance, violence applied anything but gratuitously, violence that is essence. Let's call it hardcore, or why not, blues, call it whatever we like as it doesn't change, Unsane deconstruct and devour every definition, a desecrating orgy.

"Swim" is an obsession.
It starts already with foam, and it's at your neck in an instant, like a bad android. The guitar sounds like a torn body, Spencer sings over it about pain, but also resistance, because the fibers hold, somehow, who knows how. And then the rest is catharsis, because it couldn't be otherwise, the construct, already sparse, thins out, and "Swim" becomes a mania. The words vanish, now powerless. The noise is now wildly marked, hypnotic, an iron breath that screeches, a dull moan. Metronomic blows, one after another, dark, between them silence. The gap is unfillable, it's true that there is only silence to the real questions, it's the hole we carry within us, we book it at birth.
Exhausted, "Swim" slurs to the end.

Black vertigo, down to the viscera, unmediated torment, Dostoevsky's man, his scream, inexorably rhythmic, finished, like time.