HIDE
Spit Or Swallow Every Soul Will Taste Death
Get Better Records
One of the most legitimately unnerving acts to have emerged in the past decade, HIDE’s body of work has ranged from high goth to moody industrial texturing to pure, brutalist techno. That range has contrasted with vocalist Heather Hannoura’s unrelenting presence on record and live, venting spleen with Old Testament fury refracted through modern atrocities, both individual and universal. New EP Spit Or Swallow Every Soul Will Taste Death maintains that intensity while exploring some new ground.
At seven tracks and twenty-nine minutes, with one one of the duo’s recent set of stand alone singles appearing here, Spit Or Swallow is a tight reintroduction to the band (and certainly an uncompromising starting point for anyone just catching up), but musically it’s as varied and as experimental as anything they’ve attempted in the past. The sampled and heavily processed industrial thrash guitar that kicks off “Rebel In The Soul” is far closer to Ministry than anything we’ve come to expect from HIDE, but the cut cycles that out for some of Seth Sher’s signature pummelling programming, and then augments it with lighter metallic percussion. The whole affair has a whiplash effect, and serves as a microcosm of the record’s rapid-fire shuffling of style. Plenty of the EP’s noise isn’t at all circumscribed by most common understandings of either industrial or techno: the bright orange feedback squall of “Deeper than Death (here on earth) I DESTROY” is matched by Hannoura’s high, mocking sing-song, the whole thing tremoring like a Skullflower or Boris styled speaker blower.
Bracketed by distorted samplings and reworkings of the Moonlight Sonata and Schubert’s “Ave Maria”, HIDE’s fascination with beauty as something corruptible or corrupting, or at the very least capable of being used for nefarious ends runs through the record. As always, there are no hard and fast divisions between the different dimensions of Hannoura’s lyrics: personal trauma, general social forces, the body, religion, and more all blur together as part of an unending ritual in search of purging and catharsis. HIDE’s writhing spasms flail out at new angles here, but have lost none of their striking power.
