Review: Nac/Hut Report - Schism No Symmetry

Schism No Symmetry is an album in ruins. Melodies have been reduced to fragments of noise that splutter and cut out, leaving gigantic spaces of emptiness where walls of rhythm used to be. A vocal drawl sidles between the chunks of sound, like a draft washing through an abandoned building. Noise rasps like a tangle of loose wiring spewing down from the ceiling. Yet the parts that remain allude to a former grandeur; tracks like “Cold Lands/Throw Up Gold!” were perhaps once palatial halls of shoegaze, with guitar leads glistening off sheer faces of distortion and a sense of triumph pressing up through the façade of melancholy. From the scraps that remain, one can imagine Nac/Hut Report formerly resembling The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Psychocandy: a hurricane of love, noise and sedation.

Yet if I discussed Schism No Symmetry purely in terms of destruction, I would criminally overlook the intelligent thought behind its creation. After all, the demolishment is illusionary; the record is very intentionally part-built, working with the tension between what the music is and what it so desperately wants to be. The melodies are clever crafted from harmonic implication, with chords alluded to by the arrangement of the space around them. Meanwhile, the noise screams and stutters like printers and fax machines with parts missing; machines lamenting Nac/Hut Report’s abandonment of their creation, whirring and grinding as mechanical intention meets the brick wall of physical incapability. It’s a beautiful ode to willpower and hope, thrashing manically within the shackles of adversity.