Review: Rattle - EP

Rattle sound so utterly fresh. Drums and vocals, stark impact and warm emanation, monochrome beat and colour-rich melody; it’s a simple, unambiguous symbiosis, with two polarised shapes sat at opposite ends of the canvas. I take my seat in the large open space in between them – the resonant thumps of percussive instinct beneath me, the voices in harmonised, bird-like formation above me – and feel enriched by the clarity in which I hear drum skins flap and vocal chords prise open. In a strange paradox, Rattle are a both an indivisible organism and two entities that never impede on the space of the other; a telepathically co-ordinated whole founded upon a collision of two entirely separate languages.

The songs roll ancient ritual and modern post-punk into one. The mid-tempo is such that I can both dance and maintain my resting pulse rate, swaying between gestures decorated in tiny specks of thrust and flick, with simple bass-snare dialogues tucked beneath buds of cowbell, cymbal and rimshot. The delivery is cathartic, but meditatively so – a deep, unforced exhalation. Meanwhile, the voice bounces between simple phrases as though taking infantile delight in their phonetic makeup, opting to use language as an aesthetic vessel for music rather than a clumsy means of communication; the words leap into vowels and rebound off consonants like pinball flippers, generating motion in their perpetual alternation. “It’s starting, it’s starting” Wrigley beams during the closing track, riding the melody like a seesaw, while Brown’s beats tease between spotless silence and carnival clack – I feel healthy for absorbing it all, ingesting the vibrations as form of clean, nutrient-rich life sustenance.