Review: Circuit Breaker - Grid

Just as with Cairn, I’m immediately drawn into playful, imaginary speculations of how Grid may have been recorded. This time I’m thinking of a room on a severe tilt, with the gravity cranked up so that instrument tunings start to sag; voices wobble and panic in complaint at the disorientation, while synthesiser wires come loose and bust up their own output, belching and screaming in short, haggard phrases. Clinging on for dear life in the midst of it all are songs – little minute-long drops of vague, inter-sonic co-ordination, strung together by explosive bass drum thumps or the sound of a plectrum picking the rust off old guitar strings.

I have no doubt that Grid was written and recorded quickly, caught at the moment where everything feels at its most free-flowing and awesome – the very point at which the band’s bastard logic strikes upon the desire to create something slightly coherent and catchy, passing the warped emissions of their own universe into the little 4/4, post-punk structure boxes of this one. Good stuff, and one for those that like their guitar rasps and broken drones to sound like they were captured in the giddy claustrophobia of a space craft airlock.