Album Review: My Disco - Severe

The legacy of Melbourne trio My Disco is as surprising as it is enduring. Their deliberate, methodical abdication to metronomic, punishing rhythms and monotonous syllabic utterances has stripped rock and punk of all its' flamboyant flesh, leaving a gargantuan flayed beast in its wake. The term math rock doesn't even touch the calculated precision with which Ben and Liam Andrews and Rohan Rebeiro dissect and reassemble their agitated soundscapes. It is colossal rock in its basest form - from the sparking fury of EP Language Of Numbers to the self-flagellating Cancer, scorched-earth Paradise and buoyant Little Joy, this is music as played by the Gods - aloof, all-pervading, overpowering, destructive.

This still doesn't prepare anyone for the desolate brutality inherent in fourth longplayer Severe - another cruelly apt album title. Rebeiro's drums are immense, evoking a feral, tribal netherworld in relentless scope, a death march slowed 800% yet raising the stakes on ruthless inevitability. The scarring scree of Andrews's guitar smears distortion on the likes of Successive Pleasure. Our Decade is awash in delayed guitar wails, a time capsule of sonic doom that nevertheless comes across as the most spirited track here. King Sound is pitch-tar nihilism - a death-knell chord, followed by tinnitus-itch feedback, a lengthy silence, and intensely dark lurch into life, like a ritual sacrifice in the bowels of the earth. By the time the rifle-roar of ominous closer Careless belts by, Severe has severely tested the most resilient of discerning listeners, yet this bruising effort is nothing short of spectacular.