xinlisupreme will probably melt your face off (in a good way)

Lately I’ve been lis­tening to little else but noise, punk, and black metal. This has has been the cause of some con­ster­na­tion around the GPHQ: Niina erected some of those little waffle-shaped foam sound bar­riers around my cubicle, Mike keeps drop­ping by and peering over them to “casu­ally” sug­gest I use head­phones, and I think Joel has sub­con­tracted friend-of-girlpants and physics super­ge­nius Drew D. to design a Sonic Wave Muf­fler Cannon^TM (the project has an esti­mated com­ple­tion date of Apr. 22 2009, pro­vided the $18bn in adjusted USD can be raised). But seri­ously, guys, it’s just a phase, I swear. I can guar­antee that I’ll be back to Belle & Sebas­tian and Pave­ment before, say, Sufjan gets around to recording his Idaho con­cept album.

One of the things I’ll prob­ably do before that hap­pens is destroy my ears lis­tening to Xin­lisupreme. They’re a two-piece from Oita, Japan who spe­cialize in beating the crap out of shoegazer gui­tars (but only because they love them, of course) and then drowning their bloodied, bruised output in elec­tronic noise; some­thing like My Bloody Valen­tine being eaten whole by Sui­cide and then remixed by an extremely coked-up Richard D. James (yes, I stole those ref­er­ences directly from AMG but god­dammit they’re right on the mark). The results range from ter­ri­fying bru­tality to stun­ning beauty, often within just one song. The group appeared out of nowhere in 2001 with a home-recorded demo and in 2002 they were snapped up by Fat Cat Records, home to a whole mess of under­ground inno­va­tors: Sigur Ros, Múm, and other great acts that aren’t nec­es­sarily from Iceland.

Their first two releases, Tomorrow Never Comes (buy) and the Murder License EP (buy) were pretty con­sis­tent in tone but each main­tains its own indi­vid­u­ality. Tomorrow Never Comes, for instance, has nothing to match the sheer mayhem of Murder License’s title track, while the EP has no ana­logue for the creepy, pants-wetting drone of “Fatal Sis­ters Opened Umbrella”.

Some­time last year (I don’t know exactly when because I just stum­bled upon it and every­thing google’s turning up is in Japanese) they self-released a web-only album called Nein­fu­turer, which I’ve deter­mined (using my incred­ible lan­guage skills) prob­ably trans­lates to some­thing like No Future. Great. Anyway, the album is com­prised of a few older tracks (“Murder License”, “All You Need Is Love Was Not True”, “Amyrillis”) and sev­eral new ones (including the ear­lier web-only single “Zouave’s Blue”). It’s imme­di­ately apparent that these tracks were self-produced, but raw­ness has never been a hin­der­ance to Xinlisupreme’s sound–if any­thing, it gives them a spe­cial kind of immediacy.

The new tracks are all over the place, jumping around in my head­phones like Joel on too many gummi worms. Album-opener “I Am a New Christ” starts with very MBV-like processed gui­tars but ends up with a marathon blast of white noise. Closer “In a Silent Doll” and par­tic­u­larly “Tokyo Moon” are among the most placid things they’ve ever recorded. It’s not quite as cohe­sive or as slick (there’s a term I never thought I’d use with these guys) as their first couple releases, but it’s gen­uinely weird and inven­tive and strangely emo­tional, and that’s all I really ask.

I’ve mir­rored a few favorites here, but why not just go to their site and grab the whole thing?

• “Murder License” (album version)
• “All You Need is Love Was Not True”
• “I Am A New Christ” (UT-Mix)

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