Have you ever pulled a car into park, only to have your momen- tary tranquility, along with the side of your vehicle, immediately smashed by a reckless driver?
Such is the effect of one moment exactly nine minutes and 22 seconds into “Bid Drop,” the centerpiece of Black Dice’s new release, Beaches and Canyons (DFA). It is at this moment that a dwindling ambient drone withers away into silence, only to jump back an instant later — louder, harder, and more ferocious than before. It is at this moment that Beaches comes together, and that you realize the random blips and bleeps of the previous 50 minutes were not random at all but in fact calculated pieces within a singular work. Instead of building to a peaceful conclusion, as the listener is led to believe, the dynamic climax delivers a ferocious punch of energy.
Most of Beaches seems to have more in common with the New Age compilation Pure Moods than Melt-Banana. The soothing sound effects emulate everything from waves crashing to whales singing. Fortunately, such atmospheric fluff is merely a red herring, a false start that serves to intensify the brutality of Beaches once it reaches its unexpected climax.
In a way, “Bid Drop” can be seen as the denouement of everything Black Dice has released up to this point. Prior Black Dice releases seemed to alternate between a devastating no-wave-inspired noise assault and a bleeping tapestry of ambient experiments. On “Bid Drop,” those two disparate styles meet in a boiling confrontation. While it’s certainly not the first time Black Dice have explored the gray area between passivity and rage, “Bid Drop” is certainly their most effective attempt yet. In a way they only hinted at on 2001’s Cold Hands, with Beaches, the band seamlessly forges a seemingly irrational marriage between brutal noise-rock and ambient noise, amplifying the effects of each.
It’s as if Brian Eno and Merzbow, firmly aware of each other’s existence, finally collaborated.
At their Oct. 16 show at the Abbey, Black Dice seemed firmly entrenched in this gray area between violence and pacifism. On one hand, their performance left bodies shaking like an epileptic watching Japanese cartoons. On the other, the guitarist was sitting down in a chair for the duration of the show.
The setlist drew heavily from the lighter side of the Black Dice equation, particularly from the new release. While this may be a sign of their “maturation as artists,” it was a far cry from the legendary skull-pounding horror that originally made Black Dice live shows famous.
So where do they go from here? Beaches’ greatest accomplishment may be that all bets regarding the future of the band are now officially off. After listening to some of their harsher releases, who would have guessed they would release a faux-New Age album such as this? Maybe they’ll go even further and release an Esperanto spoken-word masterpiece. More likely they’ll retread familiar territory, but if Beaches has taught us anything, it’s that Black Dice are certainly capable of recasting old ideas so they don’t grow stale. nyou
