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Time Has Come

White Fuzz

Written by: AB on 24/09/2008 21:21:27

First time I listened to "White Fuzz", I felt like putting on another album just 1½ tracks into the CD. Nevertheless, being such a dedicated reviewer, yours truly endured, and actually got through the whole album. On second try, it went down a little better, but I actually had to listen to it a couple of times before I even started to enjoy some of it somehow.

The whole album feels like Time Has Come has been scavenging for many different sound bits and audio pieces to put it together. Consisting of sounds that draw inspiration from hardcore, grindcore, noisecore, death metal and general noise, this makes for a truly chaotic and confusing album. All this have been mixed and stirred together with some quiet, slow guitar parts, electronic static and so on, to one big cacophony of chaos. The whole album has a rather unsettling organic feel to it, as if Time Has Come are improvising the music, sort of making it up as they go along. The pace swerves and changes with many aggressive outbursts of musical energy, abrupt stops, slow parts, and you never know what's coming. Hailing from Hamburg, Germany, Time Has Come has released one chaotic noisefest of an album with "White Fuzz".

The thing I enjoy the most on "White Fuzz" is the weird groove that is present in midst of all the chaos. When you can actually hear the guitars from all the noise, there are riffs aplenty present. When the drumming isn't just contributing to the overall chaotic noise (I use the word 'noise' a lot, don't I?), there's - like with the axework - some nice rhythm that fits well with the more easy-listenable parts of the album. They are few and far between though, like islands of rhythm in a sea of noise. However, I do also like the more chaotic (again a word I use alot here...), which is the major part of the album, except for one thing. The vocals. It REALLY fucks it up for me. One could imagine that the vocals would be as weird and varied as the music, but most of the time its just some crappy hardcore screaming. What. The. Fuck. It is really sad that some sucky, totally misplaced vocals spoil an otherwise interesting musical idea.

Musically, this at first reminded me of grindcore, but it really isn't. It's both more and less; more in the sense that no single genre can describe this; less because the totally absent sense of direction this has, makes it a confusing musical acquaintance. Combine said lacking sense of direction with the overall dark mood of the album, and you get the very strong sense of dismal despair present on "White Fuzz". This isn't for everyone, and it's not an album I can imagine anybody listening to regularly (I won't because of the vocals), but if you finds yourself in a weird, dark mood one day, this might just be the perfect soundtrack.

Download: The Abandomed City (Part 2), The White Fuzz
For the fans of: noise!
Listen: MySpace

Release date 22.05.2008
Regain Records