Black Dice - "Load Blown"

Black Dice - Kokomo (Paw Tracks 2007)

Black Dice - Load Blown / Paw Tracks

We sat there on the platform a long time waiting for the train. The sun hung in the sky, above the skyline of the assorted shops and modest treetops at our station, just hung there for what seemed like forever. It was a radiant glow, the kind you'd expect to see reflecting off Jim Carrey's face in a quieter scene for one of his movies. But Jim Carrey never talked about Black Dice.

"Load Blown is different," he was explaining to me, "because Black Dice are fundamentally different. There are others who have taken the same ideas and tried to make them into something - say a Throbbing Gristle or a Wolf Eyes or a host of other, smaller, inferior noise bands - that spoke to ex-nihilists and formerly self-destructive hardcore kids-turned-redemptive. The theme of redemption plays through Black Dice as much as any mindfuck experimental pretension. Which is the secret of the band in the first place."

Thrust headlong into a discussion on Load Blown was not what I had initially expected to do, you understand. I had been listening to this album for weeks and was trying to figure out the best way to present it for you. I wanted to talk about something involving Creature Comforts and the abysmal artwork of Broken Ear Record and how Eric Copeland's Hermaphrodite turned out to be disjointed shards, incomplete pieces, less focused fragments of a full-length that was still to come. I guess I could've brought up Soft Circle too, but that would've really been missing the point.

"At this stage, thinking of Black Dice as a bunch of Providence-gone-Brooklyn noiseniks is both semi-accurate and entirely relevant. Of course they could have been one of the greatest hardcore bands, spoken in the same breath as other weirdo hardcore outsiders, but when they took the step with Cone Toaster, it opened them up to all of these, well, beaches and canyons of sounds that could not have been possible before. What they're doing on Load Blown is returning to that density. Broken Ear Record was a halfhearted attempt, but this comes through as much more clear, more resolute."

Which is ironic, because Load Blown is a record all about muddling the most "accessible" bits of a song (its melody, its hook, its catch) and leaving only the thump of the kickdrum or the distorted thud of a synthesized buzz behind. In essence, they have turned a once vast sound into something tangible again. In a parallel of Radiohead (since everybody is referencing them now and I see no reason not to be caught up in the mayhem), they have finally quit racing themselves.

He put it a better way as the sun struggled to stay above the trees and the wind picked up a little. "Whereas once Black Dice were outdistancing their contemporaries in the rat race for new sounds, it seems now that they have broken through dimensions and are in fact racing backwards as the reflection in the puddle." Which is a pretentious comparison to make, but not inaccurate: Instead of running straight back to their artcore roots, Black Dice are running back to their -core roots through sparse, abstract rhythms to provide the same level of intensity in a completely different way.

Interesting are the reactions. There appears to be emerging a fair contingent who are disgruntled about this record being nothing more than a repeat of the same theme ten times over. Apparently, this is supposed to be a disappointment. But the fact that "Kokomo" does not sound all that different from "Scavenger" which does not sound all that different from "Bananas" obscures a much larger statement.

Another train clattered by. "It is extraordinarily ironic that James Murphy initially signed Black Dice to the DFA in 2002 because he felt the band was trying to make a unique kind of pop song, perhaps a little more difficult than The Neptunes, but no less passionate about the end result. Now, when their DFA contract has run its course and they're back to DIY efforts on the Paw Tracks label with their cohorts in the inexplicably more successful Animal Collective, they have finally made a record worthy of the pop moniker."

That is what lies at the heart of Load Blown. More than anything else, this is a fucked pop record. It's pop the way Black Dice would envision it in a parallel universe where Marcel Duchamp had the same ubiquity as Warhol and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the resident poet of the 20th century: backward, twisted, run through a filter of fuzzy electronics and a wall of knobs and buttons and switches, generated by a computer and delivered with a straight face. The merry-go-round sounds like "Roll Up." Children wake up sounding like "Bottom Feeder." Nothing sounds oriented.

His train finally arrived as the sun went out of view. I was thinking aloud. "What I don't understand is why they decided to return to earth when their cosmic noise had no limits anyway. It would've been different if they had come from a freeform jazz background in the first place, but they came from hardcore. Why bother with constraints when you've already broken free of the most rigorous shackles in the underground? Wasn't that what their DFA releases were all about?"

"The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe." He boarded the train. The doors were closing as I vaguely recalled... Was it Mencken? "Black Dice are not ordinary men, but that's the trick, isn't it?" The train clattered away. I went home little the wiser as the wind off the lake picked up.

At that same moment, somewhere, a kid discovered Black Dice and realized they didn't have to listen to Kodan Armada for hardcore. Somewhere else, a kid discovered Black Dice and realized they didn't have to listen to Radiohead for electronic rock. The slow revolution of redemption continues.