Shishio
Canine Heart Sounds
(Self-released)
B
It’s all too perfect that with Canine Heart Sounds, Shishio goes to show that it’s as much blood and bone as cold steel. Oklahoma’s preeminent noise-rockers have churned out material with driving sweatshop efficiency since unveiling themselves with a debut album in summer 2014, culling out three more mostly live recordings (snapshots and blueprints, mostly) before the new LP, which in many ways feels like the most fully realized product Shishio has conceived to date.
That’s fitting, because as far as noise acts go, Shishio is more fully realized than most of them, an honest-to-God live band that plays with purposeful frequency (touring, even) rather than a recording project that will occasionally throw something together to play for a couple dozen sweaty bodies to get drunk to in a friend of a friend’s basement. Rawness serves the band just fine, as those other records show, but as the band moves from skull-tapping rhythm crawls to the big brashness of “GODS COUNTRY” — a stirringly gorgeous shoegaze single with edges dabbed in The Horrors’ Skying — its obvious that Shishio is more man than machine.
In a weird cosmic coincidence, Canine Heart Sounds debuted the same month as HEALTH’s comeback LP Death Magic. The latter is 70 percent feverish apocalypse rave on the outskirts of hell and 30 percent greasy industrial exorcism at the abandoned car plant, but Shishio flips the percentages. As a bonus, both memorialize their song titles in all caps, too, because apparently a scream is the only thing that might cut through the maelstrom of garbled gear grinding and guitar welding. Through upping the accessibility (a very loose accessibility, mind you) and editing its exercises in improvisation, Shishio makes strides towards master fuzz-rearing punk rock with a rhythm section that cuts just a narrow enough inlet for salvation.
“PRESENT DAYS” — rushing in after the mood-setting title track — is perhaps the best evidence of that, dizzyingly whirring through a dance-rock jam like LCD Soundsystem doused in tar. It collapses before any hooky (i.e. out of character) choruses, but the buildups are endorphin-inducing all the same. Canine Heart Sounds is at its best when primal archetypes succumb to romantic impulses, a beast tamed just enough to let you near it, as “PRESENT DAYS” and “GODS COUNTRY” both do. They play bristled enough elsewhere (like the jerky “NEU CONTROL” or the “Negative Creep”-era Nirvana sludge of “MUTUAL HOPE”) to let you know they even when they go softer they are never going weak, and it all adds up to the band’s strongest showing to date.
