Album Review: All Tense Now Lax by Liberez

It has become increasingly rare, in recent years, to hear 'industrial' records that fully merit the name. Like most experimental musical terms, it is a descriptor that has become useful only in small doses: usually in reference to artists utilising mechanical and oppressive sonic textures. This usage, however, only conveys a part of what industrial music was originally about.

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Fusing the organic with the industrial is not a new idea, but few have done it as convincingly as Liberez. Pieced together in composer John Hannon’s studio, this fusion of found sounds, programmed drums and deliberately terrifying orchestration for strings is intriguing, dense and frankly, scary. With collaborators Nina Bosnic (“vocals”) and percussionist Pete Wilkins, Hannon plots out an album that, much like The Haxan Cloak‘s Excavation, has the semblance of a plot, that moves the listener from one state of distress to another with considerable aplomb.

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Liberez — All Tense Now Lax (Night School Records)Liberez’s John Hannon, bolstered here by Nina Bosnic on vocals and percussionist Pete Wilkins, embodies the hoary old cliché of “turning the studio into an instrument”, using his recording space in ways that utterly transform the way instruments and vocals sound. After two very impressive albums on Helm, aka Luke Younger’s Alter label, Hannon has with All Tense Now Lax elevated his experimental form of studio-birthed anti-rock to truly unexpected levels of claustrophobic power. In an age when so much rock music is bland, fearful and conforming, such hyperbole is surely deserved.

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