December - Night Of Nights

6 Jan

Pulling no punches and strutting with swagger embodies December’s 2019 Night of Nights release on Pinkman’s Broken Dreams sublabel. The rinse France regular has churned out a mesmerising EP as psychedelic as industrial. December uses noise and feedback to signify a chaotic confusion present in the minds of most people. While these techniques have been used in industrial and EBM before, the assuredness and charm attract me to the production.

From the sleek industrial textures of ‘Don’t say my name’ that buzz around your head, the sound of fuzz and distortion pedals pushed to the nth degree feeding back jazzy noodlings, resonating harshly in a noisy experimental bath. The intensity flies in and out as the speaker swings over a vast distance in front of you, steadily oscillating slowly like breaths in and out.

The vocals are an exquisite addition to the track that has them included, being less about the lyrical content and more like an unreliable narrator acting as the guiding voice throughout these incredibly intense trips. December drenches the vocals in effects, so understanding most of the lyrics is a treacherous trick to pull you further into the rhythmic psychedelics. The continuous repetitive motifs on the tracks' Intervention Tune!’ and ‘Night Of Nights’ lend themselves to getting lost within, combined with the bassline buzzes as though it were the power grid causing catastrophic earth-rupturing quakes. The Basses are relentlessly weighty, hammering home that swagger and nonchalant disregard that adds so much to the presentation and impact of each track.

The electrostatic basslines buzz under these huge potent snares, clearly designed to shake the spine, and their brutality seems to increase as you fall deeper into the record. The coarseness of the drums throughout the entire production sits ‘Night Of Nights’ somewhere between EBM and Industrial. December retains the aggressive, almost punk drum programming. Still, it lays off the metallic or over-distorted sounds found in industrial, opting for a more over-saturated flavour, saving the roughness or effects for the bass, synth and vocal lines.

It should be noted that this is a full-force outing from December full of heavy textural oddities and esoteric sound construction that wears its abrasiveness as a badge of honour throughout the whole record, an obvious observation when listening to the pulse-pounding ‘Sociability is as Much a Law of Nature as Mutual Struggle’. The synths meander around each other due to the playful filter manipulation that sees the bass poke through at times and recedes again. Something to scare the neighbours while still being pretty darn danceable.

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