Sly & The Family Drone
Walk it Dry
SCORE: 9 out of 10
For this release, the league of extra-noisy Englishmen, have opted to tackle the listener into submission with full-on blasts, but they haven’t lost their more serene side: Walk it Dry is hard, harsh and livelier than its predecessor, but no less nuanced.
When you put on a Sly & The Family Drone album you know what you’re in for: drums with a gargantuan amplitude, saxophone abuse that would make Peter Brötzmann proud and bubbling electronic textures that walk the line between soothing and tension-building; all of this is delivered with the urgency and intensity of someone being held at gun-point and their life depended on playing as loud and aggressive as humanly possible. Sly have their formula and they won’t let it go; however, this doesn’t mean that the band repeats themselves over and over. Each time you get a different kind of cake even if it has been baked with the same ingredients.
On their previous album, Gentle Persuaders (2019), the band worked with longer songs in which the intensity came and went at will; these were crescendoing pieces with a vast dynamic range, that went from quiet to loud, to really quiet and then to really loud. It was a shattering but meditative experience. For this release, the league of extra-noisy Englishmen, have opted to tackle the listener into submission with full-on blasts, but they haven’t lost their more serene side: Walk it Dry is hard, harsh and livelier than its predecessor, but no less nuanced.
Right from the start, the groove on “Black Uniformed Strutting Animal” grabs you; even if its performance is not as aggressive as in other tracks, it is still very intense and highly magnetic. As the drums become more amplified, though, the song grows to gigantic proportions. The way the toms and kick drums growl throws the listener into the stratosphere only to gently land them on glitchy electronic textures; the fall hurts, but it’s not lethal. “Dead Cat Chaos Magician” is sort of a throwback to Gentle Persuaders' teasing exercises, with ephemeral bursts of intensity that come and go until everything converges at the end, making the song fantastically implode unto itself.
“Swearing On The Horns” gives us room to breathe while “Bulgarian Steel” grabs us once more in the same style as the first track, but this time, everything is saturated from the start; the sax traces a sketchy line as feedback twirls around being drowned by the amplified drum set. As intense as these past track have been, “Shrieking Grief” obliterates everything into oblivion with its visceral and primal blend of power-electronics, free jazz and headbanging groove. This track actually marks a point of change within the album, as from this point onwards, the mood becomes more introspective. Sly provided an intense high, but they also apease the listener with a nice -albeit disturbing and melancholic- comedown.
One of the album’s highlights comes at its very end. “Tsukiji” effectively brings closure to the whole album because of its restraint. It doesn’t have any fancy fanfares or a predictable crescendo forcing its “epicness” down our throats. It is actually a quiet and gentle send off that ends everything on a eerily sad note. Who knew that these guys would be able to create such a Tarkovskian moment? The contrast is devastating: it feels like walking back home all alone after having taken part in a beautiful collective endeavor.
“My Torso Is a Shotgun” was the single chosen to promote the album, and while has its explosive moments, it is mostly a quiet piece, again very kin to the practices on Persuaders. This leaves something very clear: Sly & the Family Drone love their dynamic play; they like filling space with distortion and textures, and then let everything get sucked out like in vacuum. It plays out like a hyperventilation exercise in that it is tiring but you get a sense of relief at the end. Just like with Teatro Holofrénico’s work, the cathartic payoff is immense since the pieces feel primitive and instinctive due to the sheer brute force of their delivery. This is not overly complex music, and that’s a good thing; it leaves all the unnecessary embellishments out of the way so the message is received as it was intended.
