DEAD RIDER: CHILLS ON GLASS
No stranger to the avant-garde, Todd Rittman cut his teeth as the guitarist of experimental deconstructors of rock ‘n’ roll, U.S Maple, over an eight-year tenure that saw the cult Chicago band release five albums of pulsating, post-hard core noise rock. Now fronting the equally experimental Dead Rider, Rittman has become the ringleader of his own methodical band of peace-disturbers. True to outsider ethics, they appear to take their cues from the Velvet Underground’s neuroticism, making music not for audiences but for their own artistic gratification.
Such stringent ideals can be damaging but it’s refreshing to encounter artists who refuse to siphon their integrity for mainstream ears. And to say that Dead Rider’s latest offering, Chills On Glass, is unaccommodating would be an understatement. It is, in fact, an album that gets its kicks from being comprehensively intimidating. Each track is a discordant musing awash with a primal, artful noise that poses a perilous threat to the listener’s aural heath and places the sanity of these unfortunate souls in jeopardy.
Chills On Glass’ deliberate hostility is analogous to the reception you’d receive after stumbling into a grimy back-street barroom filled with antagonistic patrons. Imagine Todd Rittman and the band hunched over one of said watering hole’s decrepit, rat-chewed tables, slowly ingesting a poisonous tipple that mixes the claustrophobic electronica of The Prodigy with the fetid Poe-esque prose of a young Nick Cave, and you’ve captured the disturbing beauty of their third album.
A veritable nightmare of cut-and-paste instrumentation, deliciously arranged to induce nausea, the record sees walls of static noise collide headfirst with searing industrial stutters. Opener ‘New Eyes’ is a chaotic collage of synthesiser and loose drumming, glued together by Rittman’s improvised spiel. It’s an arresting start to an increasingly schizophrenic album, and one that throws the door open for the band’s myriad possibilities, their indulgence in the soothing electro-pop whirr of ‘Blank Screen’ forced to share space on the tracklist with the minimalist, jerky sound patter of ‘Four Cocks’ and blues guitar overdrive of closer ‘Fumes and Nothing Else’.
If you successfully manage to cut through the album’s all-enveloping cacophony and connect with its words, you’ll be met with non-sequiturs and introspective verse that seem to reaffirm the album’s fractured aesthetic. Fittingly, Rittman’s ruminations on everyday banality more often than not peter out entirely (perhaps because he’s got nothing to say) before careening into textured vortexes of sound.
Chills On Glass’ incoherence suggests the decay of meaning whilst its fragmented, apocalyptic instrumentation heralds the onset of anarchy. A defiant sonic assault on form, expectation and good taste. Brutal listening.
Dan Owens
