The Bug Vs Earth - Concrete Desert

Pitchfork 74

Despite the similarities between noise and heavy music, the pairing of the Bug’s Kevin Martin and Earth’s Dylan Carlson still makes for a bit of a curious contrast. The UK-born Martin traffics in chest-compressing beats, drawing on a lineage spanning from dancehall through grime and dubstep. Earth, meanwhile, is a Washington state doom band that trudges with an ambient, codeine-hazed pace. In other words, this electronic collaboration, Concrete Desert, is one man’s looming sonic claustrophobia versus another’s sprawling open space.

But dig into the nuances of their catalogs—like the sparse first-half of the Bug’s 2014 album Angels & Devils, or the low-end of Earth’s heatstruck churn on that year’s Primitive and Deadly—and it begins to make sense. Forget genre or even structure: Martin and Carlson value pressure. They revel in the attack and release of slow-building drone grooves and the contrast between thumping bass and a floating tempo. Concrete Desert sees them finding common ground, though there’s more debt to minimal, tense electronic music than dust-bleached rock. The beats themselves are sparer than most of what you’d expect from a producer like Martin, who is so steeped in dance, and Carlson adds a pensive quality, showing what Martin can build when he makes music to stop moving to.

Concrete Desert leaves space for the sounds to sink in, and you can really absorb the individual qualities of both artists. The album feels crucially airy—not breezy, but rather a stinging dry heat. A few songs let booming basslines take on the role of Carlson’s droning riffs, or echo them, like the tense “Snakes Vs Rats.” Given room to wander, the feedback and reverb become instruments themselves. Lower frequencies heave like rusted cellos on “Broke.” And a decayed quality brings out the static in the beats on “Don’t Walk These Streets” and “Hell A.” When the songs really take advantage of the record’s dynamic—ambient contemplation jolted by a rattling bassline or scalpel-jab guitar strum—the idea of this music as a doom-metal dubplate sinks in. On a track like “Agoraphobia,” the lowrider subs are laced with guitar echo, and it feels less like a meeting of bass music and drone and more like bass music as drone.

If the album’s title weren’t enough, Martin has stated that Concrete Desert is a specifically Los Angeles kind of album, and not just because it was recorded there, in Daddy Kev’s studio with DJ Nobody at the console. Even if all the words are in the titles—“Gasoline,” “City of Fallen Angels,” “Other Side of the World”—the music itself is laden with a Brit’s half-awed, outsider take on L.A. It feels a bit like the sonic equivalent to English punk iconoclast Alex Cox turning to the grimier outlying regions of L.A. to depict a lawless and unpredictable concrete landscape in 1984’s Repo Man. (Concrete Desert’s spiritual resemblance to the film’s score doesn't hurt, either.) It’s neo-neo-noir music that draws you into its discomfort. If its vast expanses leave listeners vulnerable, at least there’s more space to let yourself roam.

Drowned In Sound 70

There’s a lot made, in the press release accompanying this album, of Carlson and Martin’s obsessional interest in the 'heavy'. What exactly this term means is, of course, up to the listener as much as it is either musician, or I for that matter. Allow me, however, to use my reviewer’s privilege to dismiss discussion of the 'heavy' from my remarks on Concrete Desert. To see this record in binary terms dictated by contrast – ultimately the defining factor of 'heaviness' – seems relatively unnecessary. Concrete Desert is far from being a heavy record. In fact, despite the toned down approach Earth offered on records such as the Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light duo, this might be the most “ambient” record Carlson has been involved in to date.

That is not to say that there are not moments of definite menace spread across the album. Opener ‘Gasoline’ actually feels rather like the build-up to an onslaught of spectral drone, but the tension subsides. The creeping bassline of ‘Agoraphobia’ is sublime and one could be forgiven – when it’s joined by a vaguely Morricone-esque Carlson guitar figure – for expecting it to push into deeper, darker territories, but again restrains appears to be the order of the day. Near the end of the record it’s the trio of ‘Don’t Walk These Streets’, ‘Other Side of the World’ and ‘Hell A’ that feel closer than anything else here to Martin’s catalogue, but they only tease at the arrival of a wall of bass, something they ultimately elect (wisely) not to deliver.

On the other side of the coin are Concrete Desert’s many moments of beauty. The lush intro to ‘City of Fallen Angels’, in which Carlson’s guitar is joined by widescreen synths, is a case in point. This encourages the impression, hinted at in the first three tracks, that the album might represent something new for each artist. Concrete Desert feels like a defiantly epic record and, despite its title, might belong more as a soundtrack for volcanic Icelandic vistas than brutal, grey cityscapes. There are echoes of the self-consciously cerebral fare of Pink Floyd here that seem to contradict the noir-esque aesthetic reached for by the album’s title. In fact, if noir is on offer here, then it’s that deployed by Vangelis on the Blade Runner soundtrack.

Like much of the glorious soundworld created for that film, however, little here feels strongly welded to permanent rainfall and the constant flash of neon lights. ‘American Dream’, which adopts the role of mid-album centrepiece here, is a case in point. Over its ten minute running time it appears to be hinting not in the direction of dystopia but instead in that of a crystal-tinged future that can only just be glimpsed on the furthest reaches of a stormy horizon. By the time the 14-minute closing title track rolls in, the listener may well feel like they are closer to that glorious, distant vision.

This rather undermines the notion of Concrete Desert as an exploration of the multi-faceted gloom purveyed by both Carlson and Martin over their careers to date. Concrete Desert may – for some listeners – be missing an excavation of the dark musical hearts of each of these two fine musicians, but what it offers instead is something tangibly unique in the catalogues of two legendary figures.