Album Review : Coalminer - Perfect Wound (2024)
Whenever I get caught listening to something extreme and get irremediably asked what the fuck is wrong with me, I always answer the same thing. I didn’t really choose to listen to ungodly music, it chose me. To the uninitiated ears, power electronics is the very definition of extreme. A subgenre of noise music focused on synthetizer-based noise and extremely high and low frequency in order to create an overbearing experience, it is not meant to be conventionally liked. It is meant to be lived and felt.
Phillipines’ duo Coalminer’s new album Perfect Wound is as uncompromising and unyielding as anything in the genre.
Perfect Wound features four songs and 19 minutes of music. It doesn’t listen like a collection of songs, though. It’s more like following a stormy river into the depths of hell. The songs of Perfect Wound all follow a very similar structure, but use different syncopation, cadence and volume variation in order to separate themselves from one another. In that sense, they are chapters of a same story that display different levels of intensity. It's a rough ride on a physical and emotional level, but it's also rewarding.
The title song sets the tone for Perfect Wound. A hybrid of power electronics and harsh noise wall (in the style of The Rita) featuring a howling voice caught somewhere in the mix. It sounds like a glitchier, more limber spin off Deathpile's iconic power electronics record G.R. It traps you into a raging storm of colliding sounds while simultaneously forcing you to listen to the shrills of the damned. It’s very demanding, but it has a way of occupying all the space inside your mind that is also oddly cleansing.
Chester Masangya and Robert Glenn Dilanco crank the intensity up a notch on Rare Pagoda (what an awesome title for a noise song). The glitches are tigther together and their rhythm faster. The vocals are gnarlier, more inhuman. It sometimes straight up sounds like industrial whistles before settling back into that ghoulish, impish shrill you could hear on the title song. No peace can be found in this pagoda. It's a haunted that testify to how conflicted and chaotic spiritual anchors can be.
Löwenmensch (before you raise the Nazi flag, it means "lion man” and refers to ancient sculpture) Offers a quick respite from the collapsing wall of noise before switching frequencies and hitting up the lows and horrifying glitches in the last 90 seconds of its duration. There's something timeless and shapeless to the music of Coalminer, like ancient cosmic horrors observing you silently beyond the thin veil of reality. It’s quite powerful, but also twisty, turvy and intuitive in the way only noise can be.
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The closer Ivory Funeral start literally like a crack of thunder before leaving place to this impish tormentor speaking ancient tongues (that might be English, but I’m unable to hear and I choose to believe it’s not) over roaring static. It’s a more graceful song than the others if that makes sense as the sounds don’t collide against each other as much and flow in a more coherent direction. There’s even a moment of quiet. It makes sense as a closer. It’s not luminous, it’s not peaceful, but the life raft has arrived in hell.
Perfect Wound is a solid power electronics release. It as searing and muscular as the best of them. It’s not reinventing the wheel or anything but it found it explores its own little creative paradigm within the boundaries of the genre. If you feel compelled to deep dive into harsh noise, it’s as good a place to start as any and it’s you’re a veteran, it’ll scratch an itch. Perhaps not the most iconic or memorable thing that's been released in the genre, but it does what the genre does best.
7.5/10
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