Matt Loveridge (formerly known as noise purveyor Team Brick, now known by about a million different pseudonyms including MXLX, Klad Hest and Knife Library) has already appeared on one of the albums of the year thanks to his keyboard-playing position alongside Geoff Barrow and Billy Fuller in BEAK> (whose new single is bloody brilliant by the way). ‘Doki Doki Run’ is his first album under the Fairhorns moniker, and it’s an impressive journey through rough textures, unexpected flashes of harmony and rhythms that feel like someone is repeatedly tapping you on the temple with a pair of size 12 Dr. Martens.
Opening track ‘Ragnarok’ is a case in point. It lasts for ten minutes, and somehow makes that seem like not long enough despite the beat never changing (the Krautrock comparisons are unavoidable). ‘Doki Doki You’re Fucking Dead’ is another direct hit, evoking the similarly sweary Fuck Buttons, only with a much more interesting chord progression underneath the hubbub than that particular pair would normally employ.
‘Worried Thrumm’ loses the momentum for a bit, with cod-eastern synthetic sitars backing up a dull electro-pop melody that is thankfully buried deep in the mix. Louder techno sections periodically disrupt things, and by the end the dynamic progression has resulted in a pretty good track; it takes a bit too long to get there though.
In contrast, ‘Puking’ is over in a couple of peculiar minutes that are like watching a broken VHS where the tape is being crushed by a faulty spool. A bizarre brassy flourish forms the centrepiece, and every time it pops up you feel like you’ve just got an extra life in a forgotten eighties arcade game. It certainly adheres to Loveridge’s description of the album as “the fuzzed out, too-much-coffee haze of an all-night YouTube binge”.
‘Hectocotylus’ (the name for a squid’s cock, apparently) is easier to admire, combining a sombre organ part with dissonant synth screeches and a withdrawn melody, before suddenly mutating into a double-time, polyrhythmic workout halfway through. Things head into more post-rock territory in ‘Qiyamat For Onion Knights’, an epic mixture of beeps, distortion, intelligible muttering and someone distantly hammering away at a piano, before ‘In Water’ forms an appropriate close to the record, sounding like the soundtrack to a heroic closing scene in a fantasy/sci-fi film. Like many of the other tracks, just as it starts getting a bit tedious Loveridge ratches up the intensity for a blistering finish. He can come up with as many alter-egos as he likes, and probably will, but it’ll be hard to better this one.
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