New York mathcore crew Car Bomb have been amassing a steady following since the release of their debut Centralia way back in 2007. One part Meshuggah, one part The Dillinger Escape Plan and one part utter batshittery, Car Bomb are always a dazzling and dizzying feast for the ears. There’s been a considerable gap since their last release, their much lauded pre-covid album Cordial, so the world is more than ready to have its senses battered by them once again. Comprising three tracks, Tiles Whispers Dreams maybe short but it’s mighty, finding the band in blindingly urgent form.
The EP opens with the blistering riffage of the ever shifting “Blindsides”, a track that takes multiple rhythmic left turns, and, amongst the viciousness, delivers a disarmingly melodic clean vocal section too. A violent, heavy and charging track, the cleans offer a surprising reprieve amid the derailing chaos. The short and aggressive “Paroxysm” follows, recalling modern Meshuggah with its charging djenty chugs, powerful driving rhythms and gnarly feral vocals courtesy of frontman Michael Defferner. It may be the shortest track on offer here, but it’s the EPs most ferocious and it’s an absolutely glorious maelstrom of sound. The title track closes proceedings in wonderfully tumultuous style, managing to cram in its just over four minute runtime, danceable System Of A Down style rhythms, a tech death-esque style guitar solo, pulverising djenty chugs and more time changes than should be legal. Not only that, it all sounds exceptionally precise and well executed, indeed it’s quite a feat to make this level of unhinged disorder sound so well controlled.
Listening to Car Bomb always feels like a disorientating experience, like an audible version of the Tesseract from Interstellar, only instead of floating gently, you’re swirling in a vortex of jagged riffs and ever changing rhythms. The band have been together 25 years and thankfully, it doesn’t look like age is going to be mellowing them out anytime soon. Indeed, on Tiles Whispers Dreams they sound as focussed, urgent and aggressive as ever.
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Tiles Whispers Dreams is out 1st August
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