It reads:
What, already? It seems like only yesterday that we all frothed excitedly about the new outcrop of experimental acts, crudely lumped together as “new psych”. Yet here we are, pouring over a staging- post retrospective befitting one such outfit that has truly weathered the test of time - can it really be fourteen years? Now that’s a double itch we think worth scratching, for Terrascope likes Gnod. Well enough, in fact, to have hosted them on the postage stamp stage at The Moon, Cardiff in 2017, an occasion hijacked by a General Election; almost sunk by a thunderstorm of biblical proportions and memorable for delicious home-made curries, prepped and served in conditions that would have been considered grim even by the standards of WW1 trenches. Still, nobody died and, with a favourable wind, I can still pick up that incendiary performance in my good ear, that’s how indelibly loud it was.
Typically, the now dispersed Islington Mill collective’s idea of a compilation eschews the more obvious cuts with which, let’s face it, fans will already be familiar, and instead homes in on a collection of obscurities and never-before released material. Trading on repetition and metronomic, perpetual motion, Easy To Build... is neither overtly experimental nor is it possessed, for the most part, of the bludgeoning intensity with which Gnod have often been associated. If not exactly striking a happy medium between the two, it at least glowers warningly both right and left. As befits the band’s early DIY ethic, some of this sounds like it was recorded in someone’s sock drawer in the next street, with the vocals relayed via a cardboard tube attached to a piece of string. No matter, therein lies its period charm and intoxicating atmospheric appeal...
Read the rest here: Terrascope
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