New York's
Sightings
(Richard Hoffman on bass, Jonathan Lockie on drums, Mark Morgan on guitar and vocals)
concocted extremely hysterical cacophonous power-trio music on the brief
Sightings (Load, 2002), a super-distorted pummeling
industrial hardcore noise
that evoked the Boredoms coupled with
Mars or Teenage Jesus with peaks of
cacophonous frenzy (Pitch of My Own Voice, Cuckoo).
Michigan Haters (Psych-O-Path, 2002) expanded the idea.
The music was no less bristly, just bolder.
This time the "music" resembled the beastly fury of early Birthday Party and
Einsturzende Neubauten
rather than the psychotic agony of the no wave.
Brought A Grandfather Clock and Michigan Haters
perfect (?) the format of extremely degraded melodies buried in a chaotic avalanche of distortions and drumbeats.
The Easy Answer, which doesn't even try to sound melodic, weds punk rigor and industrial clangor.
Particularly notable are the three longer spasmodic jams:
the eight-minute pulsating pseudo-shamanic chant and dance I Feel Like a Porsche, wrapped in nuclear radiations, the nine-minute dadaistic-robotic jig Chili Dog dotted with volcanic eruptions (like a scratched vinyl copy of a Pere Ubu record), and the nine-minute chamber psycho-opera over free-form cacophony Guilty Of Wrecking.
The band is a force of nature. Forces of nature are not always pretty. Sometimes they destroy towns. Sometimes they destroy entire civilizations.
The music became a bit more cerebral than furious on the eight-song Absolutes (Load, 2003), according to an aesthetic of fragmenting and defragmenting, of swinging between primordial noise and futuristic abstraction.
The visceral punk-industrial energy Infinity of Stops
evolves into the metallic march of Canadian Money
and the geometric patterns of the eight-minute Reduction.
The seven-minute subhuman blues jam Anna Mae Wong crumbles rather than coalescing, like a bunch of delirious cavemen imitating Jimi Hendrix.
Gardens of War (Smackshire, 2004) was a collaboration with vocalist
Tom Smith of
To Live and Shave in LA.
The intellectual ambition led to
Arrived In Gold (Load, 2004), another eight-song album, where the group
manipulated the sounds of the instruments
and set the resulting magmas to robotic beats. It was a major departure from
their original take on the "no wave" and industrial music of the 1970s.
Hence the disfigured funky One out of Ten and the
alienated recitation over a robotic pattern of Internal Compass.
The ten-minute Arrived In Gold Arrived in Smoke is one lengthy tribal ceremony that fuses Suicide, African folk dance and Cabaret Voltaire.
It was like taking musique concrete to a very neurotic disco.
A more sophisticated version of their cacophony is on display in The Last Seed.
The sparse and ghostly Odds On is almost the exact opposite of their original dense bacchanals.
Sugar Sediment is a frantic raga-like excursion against a bubbling and boiling background.
Dudes is their idea of frenzied voodoobilly.
Samara Lubelski of Sonora Pine lent her violin to some of the jams.
End Times (Fusetron, 2006) marked both a return to the frenzied punk-industrial noise of their early days (The Brains you were Born With,
Bile Duct, All the Scams),
and a continuation of the "intellectual" program towards more sophisticated
compositions (the eight-minute Carry On, bordering on musique concrete) that sometimes means "more incoherent and disjointed" (the nine-minute Failure of Words, for better and for worse).
The hypnotic and pounding nine-minute Only Below sounds like a spastic industrial version of the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray.
A plethora of percussive sounds and distorted sounds
collide in the twelve-minute Slow Boat (a great musical idea that is ruined by uninspired zombie recitation).
By contrasting the feral and the cerebral dimensions of their psychosis, Sightings produced a truly infernal synthesis of noise-rock, free-jazz, punk-rock, industrial music and many other absurdities.
Through The Panama (Load, 2007) is another confused attempt at
"taming" their extreme form of noise, at producing "songs" out of the
debris (Debt Depths perhaps the best result).
There is even a cover of Scott Walker’s The Electrician.
But too often the projects ends up in
spoken-word poetry over noise (This Most Real of Hells,
Through the Panama).
Half of the album feels like unfinished ideas, notably Cloven Hoof, which
could have been a highlight.
The only truly remarkable piece is an instrumental, Black Pepper, a percussive nightmare with aspects of both heavy metal and industrial music.
City Of Straw (2010) is another attempt at coining a new format of
post-pop
schizoid song (Hush, Sky Above Mud Below, Weehawken).
Again, they indulge in spoken-word nightmares like We All Amplify.
This time around, Lockie's electronic percussion and sound effects rule the nine-minute City Of Straw and Tar And Pine.
Future Accidents (2011) contains only four songs, notably the
meandering, spaced-out, sort-of-droning, post-ambient
19-minute Public Remains (featuring keyboardist Pat Murano).
Increasingly their spoken-word pieces evoke the industrial horror hallucinations of Throbbing Gristle (the seven-minute To the World).
They disbanded after Terribly Well (2013), which contains the
crumbling soundscape of Bucket Brigades,
the harsh garage mayhem Bundled,
the jam of alien signals Yellow,
and yet another dramatic recitation against a hellish background (Rivers Of Blood).
Six leftovers from the same sessions were collected on Amusers And Puzzlers (2015).
