TIP OF THE TONGUE 19 FEBRUARY 2006
Whitehouse
Asceticists 2006
Susan Lawly SLCD-028
CD
OUT OF STOCK!
Brand new studio album from the Whitehouse duo of William Bennett and Philip Best that consolidates the kind of psychological evisceration first broached on Bird Seed tracks like “Why You Never Became A Dancer” and “Cut Hands Has The Solution”. Indeed, the mind-blowing “Killing Hurts Give You The Secrets” feels pretty much like a follow-up to “Cut Hands…” with Bennett's barked questions slowly unravelling fragile layers of personality while mirroring the breakdown of character constructs with the use of weird verbal tics and textual ellipses. The Best/Bennett tag-team have never sounded quite so aggressively choreographed, with Best on particularly rampant vocal form on tracks like “Dans”, “Language Recovery” and “Dumping The Fucking Rubbish” thanks to the heavily-gated use of word-mangling distortion. Sonically, the use of drum sounds that first surfaced on Bird Seed is back, as is the sound of intensely focussed beams of bone-blasting white noise but overall the feel is more of a trashed, punk-primitive group sound than simply fists and electronics. Some tracks - especially the weird fog horn arcs of the sole instrumental, “Nzambi Ia Lufua” - recall earlier Whitehouse records like Buchenwald but for the most part this feels like the first start-to-finish fully realised album by the revitalised group. By this point Whitehouse have established such a singularly malevolent context for themselves that all they need to do is re-contextualise certain words and phrases in order for them to take on profoundly disturbing new aspects (think of titles like “Halogen”, “Quality Time”, “Why You Never Became A Dancer”) and tracks like “Language Recovery” and “Ruthless Babysitting” take this whole approach to almost schizophrenic ends, where every lyric seems pregnant with weird personal allusions, seemingly addressing every single secret fear and neurotic thought ever to burn across the furthest recesses of your brain. After the relentless psychological battering of the bulk of the disc, Asceticists ends on a rush of almost inspirational adrenalin with “Dumping The Fucking Rubbish”, where Bennett's last lines are: “You're about to/experience getting seriously fucked up/and once you're willing to/feel that out of control/dump the fucking rubbish/rise up/rise up/kill this fucking nightmare/that is inside you.” Profoundly singular. Highest possible recommendation.
