For the past eighteen months The Bug has been regularly releasing quickfire instrumental assaults on Bandcamp in a series known simply as Machine. The time has come to gather up these ‘floor weapons’ and discharge them in one coordinated strike.
Why the military language? Put simply, that’s what these propulsive compositions of industrial sub-bass bring to mind. If you were to come across the album’s eponymous machine, you’d better run because this is a mechanical beast of war, stomping carnage across battlefields.
That’s not to say it’s an explosion of blood-curdling gunfire from start to finish. The sixth track, for example, is probably about fucking a washing machine. It grinds, shifting tempos and tonal positions, applying increased pressure and urgency before giving way to gentle waves of crackling serenity. Just as the seas of searing static which make up ‘Floored (Point of Impact)’ evoke a sub-aquatic, post-apocalyptic rave taking place aboard a submarine on a flooded planet. In the background the radar tone sampled by Danny Brown on ‘Die Like A Rockstar’ pings out to remind us that trouble could be incoming.
A sense of paranoia runs throughout Machine. Penultimate track ‘Bodied (Send For The Hearse)’ is made up of the rustling, bustling sounds of writhing insects. As if the creatures squirming deep below the perfectly mown grass of Blue Velvet’s front yards have somehow crawled into your headphones. Beneath the immaculate veneer, something deeply upsetting is occurring.
‘Shafted (Laws of Attraction/Repulsion)’ finds the downhearted hubbub of life leaking in from behind steel doors as its industrial dub booms and churns like the last factory in the centre of a smog-choked metropolis. Alongside the vast reverberations echoing out into an unknowable void on ‘Sickness (Slowly Dying)’, piston-pumping rhythms keep your focus on what lies in front, doing its best to discourage glancing back towards whatever it is that’s gaining on you over your shoulder.
Almost inevitably for a project that required such regular output over a relatively short period, there is a certain amount of glancing to the past. Both ‘Inhuman (Let Machines Do The Talking)’ and ‘Floored’ feature the descending drone siren from Fire’s government-skewering ‘Pressure’. It’s like an air raid warning system, warning us of what’s to come. ‘Departed (Left The Body Behind)’ utilises a disembodied chord pattern reminiscent of ‘Tired of Me’ from fellow aural assault instigator Justin Broadrick’s Jesu project. It’s stretched out, manipulated and mangled. And there’s the sound of someone’s tibia going – The Bug’s trademark snare crack – popping right before most drops.
Machine is an album of military rhythms, deep sub pressure, rasping bass synths heavy enough to take chunks out of the earth, and massive, driving, low-end drones that occasionally sound like weeping hairdryers. Yet, through all of that, there are glimpses of a melodic melancholia. It’s a quality that emerges for just long enough to reveal a heart beating beneath the steely exterior before being engulfed and swept away.
