Blacklevel Embassy – New Veteran LP

$25.00 $15.00

OSCL, 2012.

“After a couple of years on the bench, Blacklevel Embassy return with a third album of light-switch, epilepsy-inducing face melters. Hair trigger tight and sharp as an executioner’s sword, “NEW VETERAN” lops away at conventional structures but allows curious mutations to grow freely in the stumps. Pale bodies with wildly colourful distorted heads for songs in a group hug / cluster fuck of a record that is at once a tense but exhilarating listen. Recorded by ARIA Award Winning producer JonBoyRock at Megaphon Studios and later mixed at the Chinese Brothel in Sydney, New Veteran was birthed and finally delivered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service.

The title track is the slaughtered sign post for the rest of the record. The dichotomy sits perfectly as a bi-polar manifesto, a mission statement of intent to conform to norms whilst blowing them apart from within their own machine. The honed and familiar components are all there, but they possess less corruptible joints. Those parts that have survived the cull are designed exclusively to pulverise or cut. What is immediately apparent is that the vocals have been elevated in the ranks to a position rarely attained in angular rock n’ roll. Their integration is generally a secondary consideration with many bands of the ilk proclaiming their irrelevance and subsequent relegation to the shameful shadows of the mix. From the outset on New Veteran the vocals are right on and belted like an insubordinate.

Old Revolt continues this theme, insanely tuneful while culminating in an apex mantra of “Rock and Roll has been and gone”. Viking Tattoo envelopes itself like a norse war chant. Rollicking and atomising. The drumming of new stickman Joel Ellis hypnotising in its rolling onslaught. Tony revolves around sheet glass guitar work in ever tightening spirals until everything shatters. You Should Build Yourself A Deck displays hooks with deeper throats and wider barbs. It sets a disjointed and fractured tone and descends into a solitary rimshot rumba. “Bill Hunter was a tremendous loss to smoking booze and drinking pot.” Gary is a lurching, apelike bastard dragging its cro-magnon arm hammers across the thin ice of the 90’s. Weng Weng Is A Secret Agent and the kind of clandestine operation that sheds light on why Blacklevel Embassy get the call up every time Future Of The Left roll into Australia. Spies of a feather….and when combined with the blistering end times of Midnight Siblings, Neighbour Ray & I Keep Making Tiny Men, New Veteran ends with a cataclysmic big bang. Structurally Sound.”