Tracklist
1 | DOGTOOTH | 6:52 | |
2 | REEPLACED | 5:16 | |
3 | I M NOT SURE | 2:25 | |
4 | AND NOW THEY WANT MY BLOOD | 3:42 | |
5 | MALICE | 4:43 | |
6 | DEEVINE | 3:17 | |
7 | TEARS ON THE CHEEK OF DRUM GOD CHANDE | 3:46 | |
8 | SOMETHING NEW | 4:27 |
The White Hotel’s HEAD II label follow releases from Blackhaine and Rainy Miller with Iyunoluwanimi Yemi-Shodimu’s debut as LINTD, summoning the gothic and macabre through a lens of Nigerian heritage and modernity; a ravishing, Grimm-style faerie tale boldly toying with ambient noise x rap conventions with production from Space Afrika, Porter Brook, Fyn Dobson, and DJ Chande.
With introductions made on the ’Smooch Soundsystem’ tape for Sheffield’s Second Born label, LINTD’s debut proper now renders an oblique portrait of an artist shapeshifting into their preternatural form, uneasily negotiating themes of paranoia and violence, pleasure, darkness, strength and family bonds.
The album enacts its sorcery in eight parts playing to a broad spectrum of styles; thought-broadcasting whispers, freeform poetry, gargles and coos - against backdrops painting anxious intimacy and panoramic, vertiginous negative space. It’s a lot, but deftly distilled to a rare quintessence comparable to Croww’s nu-metal alloys and Rainy’s northern gothic, aspects of LA Timpa’s dare-to-differ songcraft, and Klein’s barbed avant-classical-grunge snapshots.
Porter Brook proves to be a key foil, responsible for a lion’s share of the production, diffusing across bleak concrète interzones and desiccated rhythm structures in a movement from the choral swells and organ shards that pierce the titular opener (a co-production with Space Afrika) thru a standout denouement ‘Tears on the Cheek of Drum God Chande’, laced with ricocheting tabla by the eponymous Daytimers don, before Fyn Dobson (occasional drummer for Loraine James) helps shut it down with a mesh of brambled jungle and noctilucent pads that wreath some of LINDT’s fiercest bars on ‘Something New’.
They stake a darkly sublime tension on the suppressed threat of ‘Reeplaced’, and something like Klein x Mica Levi in the comic-tragic plead of ‘I’m Not Sure’, while reflecting on emoptional vampires in an exemplary centrepiece of alien, discordant sludge ‘And Now They Want My Blood’, finally offering relative atmospheric respite on ‘Malice’ and ‘Deevine’.
It’s all part of a proper gesamtkunstwerk, galvanised by art direction from preeminent snapper Timon Benson and emblematic of the polycultural short-circuiting of theatre, literature, music and art keenly fostered by the world’s greatest MOT garage-turned-pleasuredome: @M3_7LW.