Review: Human Impact ‘Gone Dark’
Raw. Dystopian. Abrasive. Adjectives many have used to describe the fierce and insistent music made by Human Impact. And they are all perfectly adequate words to use when talking about the sound produced by this group of legendary noise-makers – Chris Spencer (Unsane), Jim Coleman (Cop Shoot Cop), Eric Cooper (Made Out of Babies), and Jon Syverson (Daughters).
Each of whom has established themselves as a vital force in sounds of the raw, dystopian, and abrasive kind in their own rights. Together, their sound is a force of nature, a battering hurricane spread over the nine tracks, forty-four minutes of their second album, Gone Dark (Ipecac Recordings). From the album’s cover of a row of police in riot gear, holding batons and a megaphone, menace you against a backdrop of what looks like a distorted brutalist/modernist apartment block.
Collapse, the opening track, sets the stage with a haze of electronic noise, clinking bells, pulsing, low bass and the voices of emergency dispatchers before being joined by razor-wire guitars and tight, insistent drums. Then, Spencer’s snarling voice, telling us that ‘nothing I see gets us free.’ It is an intensely beautiful and existentially bleak commentary on this world we find ourselves living in. It is a collapsing world of failing institutions and states increasingly relying on violence and fear to exert their control over, and exploitation of, people, lands, and resources.
As we move onto Hold On, with its driving riff and swirl of industrial noise, there’s a sense of defiance in the face of all that collapse, ‘Just one way to fix these mistakes’, as Spencer reminds us. Bleeding into Destroy To Rebuild continues this theme of defiance, of finding a way through and ultimately out of the mess we’re in. The slower, doom-laden, sludgy pace gives a sense of space, time to absorb and consider what world we want to see rise from the ashes of the one we inhabit. A world we can remake for the better, as long as we resist the grasping tentacles of this one.
Gone Dark is a brilliantly executed album full of beauty and terror, despair and shards of defiance…
Reform returns to remind us of how our systems have failed us, the predictable reliability of them to function, as we assume they should, is an illusion. There’s a claustrophobic feel to this track, Spencer’s vicious guitar wrapping around Coleman’s electronic elements, both playing off Syverson’s exacting drumming and Cooper’s bass – the beating dark heart of this hurricane. Imperative, like Collapse, begins with Coleman’s wizardry, a strangely gorgeous, shimmering patch of menacing sound before the gale force winds kick in. This song exemplifies the elements of menacing, captivating beauty, ferocity, and a despairing defiance – or defiant despair – that Human Impact have captured so perfectly here.
Their ability to conjure multiple atmospheres simultaneously, integrating them into a blinding torrent of sound, is part of what makes Gone Dark such an excellent and accomplished album. The years of experience and time-honed skills on display here are impressive. Disconnect, the next song, continues the relentless atmosphere, the journey of the album inexorably pulls you along. Syversons drumming shines in particular here, sonically embodying that burning intensity. The movement into Corrupted happens almost seamlessly, the slight jangle of Cooper’s bass holding the whole track together.
When Repeat cuts in, that bass turns serpentine, like a dark river running the track’s length, sweeping along Spencer’s guitar, which here adopts that ominous, doomy nighttime feel, a distorted black shadow absorbing, yet also reflecting the light. This is one of the best tracks on an album full of incredible music, a slightly more controlled version of a sound like no other. Its almost unworldly quality is entrancing. The song ends as it began, and we have arrived at the end of the pathway laid before us with Collapse as the final track Lost All Trust pours out of the speakers. There is the earthquake low end, the cutting guitar, all menaced by a veil of industrialized noise. In the end, you are left with a moment of feedback pulsing around you before the too-silent silence sets in.
Gone Dark is a brilliantly executed album full of beauty and terror, despair and shards of defiance, of hope, even. Human Impact have created something special here, which speaks to the cacophony of horrors we are confronted with daily, the sense of a world turned to not just darkness, but an existential bleakness that has permeated all aspects of life. They also remind us that we can resist this world and burn it to the ground to make way for something new. Something better.
Label: Ipecac Recordings
Band Links: Official | Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Amanda Votta
