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Released on June 29, 2015 via Housecore Records
I’ve probably watched every Author & Punisher documentary on YouTube and I still don’t know how the fuck Tristan Shone does what he does, I don’t think anybody does. I’m guessing Phil Anselmo, who produced Melk En Honing and put it out on Housecore Records, just mic’d up the room and let him get on with it. He makes music for people who watch Gaspar Noé films and think “hey, I must get this soundtrack”. It’s so deeply oppressive, so foreboding, so grim, it draws you in like iron filings to a giant horrible magnet.
You could draw the standard comparisons with Godflesh if you like, but I reckon a closer fit in terms of ethos and style is Black Pus, the solo project of Lightning Bolt’s drum-bothering maniac Brian Chippendale. Sure, he still uses something you’d recognise as a musical instrument, but that use of percussive and vocal effects to acheive the explicit aim of unnerving the listener is something both entities share. Black Pus is a lot punkier than the doom-leaning Author & Punisher, but they’re certainly operating in the same arena.
It sounds huge. Shone has managed it on all his previous releases, and this is no different – you can feel the heft on these machines. It sounds like he’s somehow harnessed a factory and forced it to make music. In the inevitable dystopian future, our eventual robot overlords will talk to each other in sounds much like those found on Melk En Honing. It might surprise you to know, after all this, that the album is also very catchy.
Opener ‘The Barge’ is made for a sweaty singalong, and if you’re not down in the pit for the almighty Shame, you’ll regret it. Remember ‘Wide Open Wound’, off Nails’ last album? Turn up ‘Shame’ and tell me that it doesn’t knock that almighty hammer of a riff into a cocked hat. It even has a breakdown. There’s even singing, actual honest-to-goodness singing in the rather touching ‘Future Man’, which still retains the heaviness of the rest of the album but demonstrates that a fleshy, blood-filled heart beats underneath all that machinery. I bet it’s transcendent live. I reckon this is what the final tracks to Nine Inch Nails albums would sound like if Trent Reznor could give up the synths – it definitely sounds like the final pulsing drones of a slowly dying world, Shone himself screaming about the end of humanity into a hurricane. I found it quite moving.
It’s definitely the best Author & Punisher album, definitely. Whether I could listen to it more than once a week, I honestly don’t know. As first singles go, ‘Callous and Hoof’ certainly sets out the stall for what Author & Punisher is all about, and is an excellent microcosm for the album as a whole – touching in parts, brutal in parts, but never anything less than totally unique and uncompromising. Nobody else is making mechanical doom, nobody else would. We need Author & Punisher, and doom would be less interesting without him in it.
