Coreline- Please Keep Moving Forward

Artist: Coreline
CD Title: Please Keep Moving Forward
Label: Infekted Sound
Reviewer: Matthew Johnson
Date: 9-25-06

With an innocuous title like Coreline and a CD cover featuring a vague, blandly pleasant landscape, you might expect the debut from this English project to be equally innocuous and pleasant Weird maybe, and a little experimental, like something from Warp Records or Planet Mu, but certainly nothing overtly abrasive. Certainly nothing like this. For although there are hints of a softer side in evidence here in the perky synth and piano lines of "Lost So Much" or the glitch and strings introduction to "Point Of Transience," the overwhelming impression of this CD is one of relentless power noise. "Chown" starts things off with pounding beats filled out by an echoing tide of overlapped and heavily processed vocal samples, while "Jump" is crowded, chaotic noise balanced out by a hint of funkiness that renders it club-friendly. Of all the selections, "Morrigans Break" is perhaps the darkest, with echoes and reverberations giving things a militaristic and industrialized edge, while "Forward Sequence" is Coreline's most brutal offering, all but abandoning the dance elements in favor of pure rhythmic punishment. "Organized Sound" shows some real subtlety, building up the rhythmic pummeling around judiciously placed bits of soundtrack material, as does the somewhat gabber-inspired "Overdrive." Generally, Coreline's production quality is focused more on precision heaviness than sheer distortion, so this isn't quite "classic" power noise in the vein of Noisex or Converter, but it's still too harsh to be labeled anything else. No matter how you categorize it, though, Coreline's debut is a brilliant one, and fans of Mlada Fronta and Monstrum Sepsis should particularly be into this.

Visit www.coreline.net for more information.