Skinwalker - Man Walks Backwards into the Ocean

Angry Metal Guy

Alaska bears the honor of being the largest landmass of freedom—larger than even Texas—and also the most sparsely populated space in the union. Separated both geographically from the country and communally within its borders, living in the frozen frontiers can create a profound sense of isolation. Hailing from Anchorage, the industrial hardcore two-man assault of Skinwalker seems to find inspiration (or rather spite) in the kind of loneliness and frustration that a great, open land can bring. Having released only nuggets of their downcast wisdom over the past couple years, Skinwalker has been fine-tuning their hissing, howling, and malformed tunes for maximum impact, ready to enter the realm of full-length fury.

Paranoia surrounds both the sounds of Skinwalker and the folklore from which their namesake originates. As a manifested character of evil and witchcraft, the skinwalker, in American Indigenous traditions, represents a pure and real phenomenon of negative, chaotic intent. And reflecting that, Man Walks Backwards into the Ocean through shattered industrial pulse and scream-walled breakdown forces its way through fifteen tracks of disconnected vignettes of disaster and dissociation. As with much industrial music, a heavy layer of cringe-inducing narrative plows unsubtly over its crackling beats, with tracks like “Witch”¹ and “Under the Veil” letting loose dead-eyed spoken word lamentations in a manner that fits with the late-night doom-scrolling aesthetic that Skinwalker chases.

Man Walks Backwards into the Ocean by Skinwalker

One hand holding Godflesh-toned, brutalist rhythms and the other releasing Racetraitor-lit metalcore lashings, Skinwalker wears a robust shroud of intensity. And with most tracks throughout hanging around the two-and-a-half-minute mark, it’s rare that any individual moment overstays its door-kicking welcome. Blowout intro “Finding Solitude in Suffering” drops mutilated chords against an urgent percussive build that falls face-down into a mangled throat tirade. Early burner “Eighty Six Thirty One” melts break-inspired cyber-kicks against riffs made by a guitar that shouldn’t have survived its output. Late album pick-me-up “A Deconstruction of Tragedy” sees Skinwalker launching a Nails-spikedsprint into an unholy breakdown that should lead any lover of flipping tables down a path of relentless stank. Distortion, of course, is the key to Skinwalker’s success, and with noise as a backbone to their hardcore spirit, not a moment exists without frying or collapsing its electronic nature.

Ambitious in output, Man Walks doesn’t always land as well as this act’s talent would suggest. Skinwalker does lean into many higher frequency squeaks, blips, and other electronic squeals that break of the mire of broken amp tones and full volume drum blasts that smear a static black about this debut, but not often in a way that breaks up the landscape. More often, the kinds of flippant and flittering noise signals that sear and tickle the canals like a pleasurable irritant find position to fizzle and fade away with conclusions—exclamation marks to statements that lack differentiation prior (“An Avocation for Pain,” “Bastard Son of God,” “Under the Veil”). It’s frustrating because when these kinds of scurries find a place in breakdown or bridge (“Below,” “What We Do Is Not Art,” “To Detest a Nameless Grave”), they find a welcome home and amplify the already ceiling pushing sounds that Skinwalker has built up to that point. But as it is, Man Walks lands in a sound design that feels hollow in its crushed layering that do no benefits to longer and shorter numbers alike—especially plaguing the instrumental break “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.”

Yet in a rare feat, Skinwalker has managed to arrive at an industrial, metalcore, and noise-fused sound via the path of electronics first, which doesn’t often feel to be the case for acts who might appear as sound cousins. Occasionally, a throbbing wall of distortion or fret-rattling plonk will resemble something that you could believe rendered from a traditional guitar or bass. And, though abusive toward a standard throat’s life, the vocals decayed through carefully chosen methods of capture render as human—tortured, pleading, confused, but human all the same. Man Walks Backwards into the Ocean, as a first foot forward for Skinwalker, has a certain polish, a certain earnestness that leads me to believe that this sound will develop and grow and explode—tricky rhythmic exercises like “Dancing on the End of a Pen” and “Eighty Six Thirty One” come naturally to their brand of anger. But as it stands, Skinwalker shows only glimmers of what their true power holds.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: PCM²
Label: Self Release
Websites: skinwalkernoise.com | skinwalkernoise.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: August 16th, 2024

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