Transitional

Nothing Real Nothing Absent

Written by: PP on 27/07/2008 09:55:03

Yeah! Finally an ultra-experimentalist noise act that doesn\'t have its head up so far in its own arse that it\'s impossible to make any sense of their record. Usually when I\'m forced to review records where vocals are either an extremely seldom occurrence or absent altogether, I\'m facing off with an hour\'s worth of discordant noise-effects plunged into one steaming pile that smells bullshit from five hundred miles away. Not Transitional and their album \"Nothing Real Nothing Absent\", however, as these guys at least have some decency towards the media and wrap their post-rock influenced noise experiment into a format that\'s actually reviewable!

Nevertheless, the majority of the \'music\' on the album will pass a couple of miles over the head of the regular music fan, as their minimalistic sample/effects mish-mash is a) difficult to interpret, and b) even more difficult to find a purpose in. Imagine the weirdest sounds you can think of coming from a guitar, add in some echoing drumming and seemingly neverending distortion, and you\'re pretty close to the album opener \"Nowhere Shining\" or the third track \"This Paradise Part 1\". The latter includes some vocals too, which lean strangely on a Daft Punk/Mogwai platform, but nonetheless function really well on the song. Part 2 of the song returns the listener back to the semi-metallic riff-looping and gloomy, scratchy atmospheres. And for once, it\'s relatively easy to see what Transitional are trying to do here, as opposed to 99% of their colleagues - paint a devastating landscape in your mind, one where you\'re a sole survivor of a nuclear disaster, wandering lonesomely around the savage, disturbing scenery without having the faintest clue of what to do next.

Transitional and \"Nothing Real Nothing Absent\" is not for everyone, because listening to the record requires you to drop everything you\'re doing in order to get properly sucked into the atmosphere. But once you allow the record to do that, you\'re in for a noisy surprise that\'ll make you realize that sometimes ugly music can be beautiful, too.

Download: This Paradise Part 1 & 2
For the fans of: Fear Falls Burning, Mogwai, Vverevvolf Grevh
Listen: Myspace

Release date 27.05.2008
Conspiracy Records
Provided by Target ApS

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