(((O))) : JK FLESH / MONRELLA – SHOUTING THE ODDS

There is some commotion at the door. Loud little guy with a shaved head is giving it large. He’s wiry and tense, bristles with energy. His mate looming behind him is tall and pale, quiet. They make an odd couple. ‘Detective’ MONRELLA is the one SHOUTING THE ODDS there, his more enigmatic companion is JK FLESH. They have each gone by many names but probably need little introduction here. Forty years ago they were briefly in Napalm Death together. They helped create grindcore. They both tired of that caper fairly quickly but have since remained relentlessly productive underground heroes making music of various kinds in different guises. These two they use to make steel hard techno and this time out they’ve brought four tracks each.

Most likely this is very much what you expect it’s going to be, eight industrial techno slammers and no messing about. Time has not mellowed or slowed them. First side is JK Flesh and the titles Justin’s picked here do not exactly suggest dancefloor good times – ‘CONDITIONAL’, ‘TRANSACTIONAL’, ‘DISAGREEABLE’ and ‘USED/USER’ reads like a terse and wounded haiku, like four grim bites at the same bitter apple. The tracks themselves are not quite so dark, a string of fairly stripped down underground thumpers that set out a pattern, work through a few shuffles of layers and wind up with no nonsense. They’ll put a spring in your step listening around the house and would definitely have me moving on the dancefloor.

Over on the other side MONRELLA keeps things going in a similar vein with a few different tweaks and turns. ‘NIGHT BEFORE RAKE’ has buried vocal cuts and spectral swarms of sound that come forward to chase you about, ‘DOUBLE RED’ uses some pretty old school sounds without making a big deal out of it, mutating them into its driving synth stab. It also has an odd noise like rattling nails in a jar that I like. The last track is called ‘SHELF’ which, as a title for a piece of hardcore techno, amuses me quite a lot. Doesn’t seem to be the shelf where he keeps the jars of nails and screws though.

SHOUTING THE ODDS is a solid chunk of Birmingham techno with very little by the way of frills, it’s muscular, rhythmic, machine music. Very enjoyable if you like that sort of thing, (and I’ve no idea why you would not) but it’s quite a specific mood. If it’s not your thing they have others. Mick Harris’s latest manifestation is called Blare Weight Unit and is a slower, dirtier, bass heavy kind of sound, he also made more music with Painkiller last year. You might know Justin Broadrick recently called time on Godflesh following some ill health, we wish him well for his recovery. JK FLESH is only one of his many other projects that he will be continuing.