Insayngel (Heavy Tapes)

Blink and you may have missed them; Insayngel was two members of Sightings with a few other people, an ex-Excepter guy and people who were also in a band called Vizusa (according to the infallible discogs - I've never heard of 'em). The Pusheadesque cover art may give a hint as to the direction of these sounds - this is harsh, sick noise-rock, straining to get free from some imagined shackles. 'Plastic Ancestor' begins things on a percussive note, with Caitlin Cook's voice definitely in 'caterwaul' territory and stretching over a nervous thumping bassline and what sounds like a bunch of cans being kicked around in a bin liner. It's really, really messy, but the rhythm section knows what they're doing and they shift into different movements, which gives it just enough of a centre to lurch along. I don't know when or how this was recorded, but when I listen to it, I just feel hot; perhaps it's because every time I remember being in Brooklyn it's always somehow summer so it's sticky and muggy. This, I can imagine, came out of jam sessions during this time, scraping away at distorted guitar strings and pounding on drums just as a way to stay cool. No lyrics are intelligible, and it's lo-fi enough to distort in all of the right places. The guitar playing sometimes has this weird slide sound, sometimes there's an incursion of low end that glows underneath it all, and sometimes the cymbals cut through everything else in a really unbalanced way. 'Hard to Handle' is not a Black Crowes cover, but a big mess of a song that is kinda fun to listen to. I keep coming back to the word 'lurching' to describe things, even though it kinda swings. The Sightings guys are the rhythm section and you can tell they're an ongoing musical relationship, and I should really listen to Sightings more because they're somehow underrated after all of these years. 'Black Rock Way', the longest track, is also the furthest away from a cohesive song though I'm not sure how much, if any, of this record was composed to begin with. This reminds me of the Godz, Cro-Magnon or some other primitive 60s thing, and has an oscillating keyboard/electronics part to take this firmly into bad trip territory. It slows to a crawl, with nothing but static and bumping notes and stammering, and it conjures an element of madness that's weirdly fun. I think back to that Hospitals LP discussed back in August and how these both come from a similar place, but one is quite clearly West Coast and the other quite clearly from a more high-octane lifestyle. Insayngel might be a terrible name, but if madness is the state attempting to be portrayed by this music, they kinda nailed it, or at least aspects of it.