ESA
Sounds For Your Happiness
Negative Gain Productions
With a steady release schedule and having recently crossed its two decade tenure, Jamie Blacker’s ESA project’s long been an established quantity for rivetheads and DJs on both sides of the pond, and with good reason. Blacker’s long had his heavily stylized (and elevated) form of modern rhythmic noise down to a science; cue up any of the last handful of ESA LPs and you know you’re getting punishing beats and minimalist yet hi-def programming with some flourishes lifted from neighbouring genres like gabber and aggrotech, with a personal tour of hell offered by Blacker’s unmistakable vocals, an experience less like tagging along with Charon or Virgil and more like being dragged on a chain by a rampaging Cerberus. The latest ESA LP, arriving with the eerily prosaic title Sounds For Your Happiness, keeps that hot hand going with a dense and lengthy barrage.
Built upon metallic programming and flitting between classic industrial club kicks and blast beats, Blacker sounds at home venting bile atop cuts like “Pound Of Flesh” and lengthy closer “The Gallows You Built For Yourself”. The immediacy of an oontzy banger like “Caligula” belies a deceptively complex arrangement, with chopped samples sidechained to beats and later being filleted into thin digital stutters for dramatic effect. It’s not all technical flourish, though, with the swinging chug of “It Will Never Be Enough” evoking death metal, or at least Ministry in their more downcast modes, and Blacker’s road warrior swagger in full effect on “Something For The Horsemen”.
The lengthy run time of the majority of the twelve tracks allows for a lot of shifts; the effect is marked when acidic washes of trance-cum-electro-industrial pads break through the thudding edifice of “Ratchet” at the six-minute mark (replete with some acid-house styled gospel samples). The same goes for the first appearance of truly ‘clean’ vocals from Blacker mid-album on “Rats Come Together”. The samples, breakdowns, and other tics and quirks peppered into the spaces between assaulting measures help to keep you on your toes through these epics, and occasionally add some levity (like the whinnying which punctuates “Something For The Horsemen”).
If there’s a weakness in Sounds For Your Happiness it might just be that there can be simply too much of its merciless assault, even with the aforementioned shifts and variances, over the course of its sprawling 75 minutes. It’s hard to cite that as much of a fault when none of the tracks feel repetitive or superfluous and each holds up well as a standalone piece, and may just be a question of endurance. As always with ESA, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
