Sightings: Absolutes

There's nothing like a big burst of noise to serve as a reminder that sound is a physical entity–not just a passive effect courting the senses, but a grating, growling force unwilling to be bent or assimilated. Reasserting that point for music doesn't require setting the bar particularly high, but refining it in an interesting way does. The Rhode Island art-punk band Sightings succeeds in doing so about half the time on Absolutes, a new album released by Load, the label that unleashed Lightning Bolt's recent bash-and-throb highpoint Wonderful Rainbow. "White Keys" opens the disc with a dense glob of white-noise thrash that buries howling vocals under a Brillo pad's worth of interlocking noise threads: Sine waves screech, static heaves, and trashcan beats fly in a fit of epilepsy. It's all overdriven and pushed beyond redline tension, but the band has a way of drawing all the component parts into a cumulative din and then playing it like a single instrument. Unlike hardcore punk derived from different elements rising up together, Sightings' music starts from the top and trickles down into eroding shapes, like sculpture chopped from a monolithic block. "Anna Mae Wong" takes shrieking train-brake noise and shaves it into musique concrete, with agitated silence moving into metallic moans and tripped-up track clicks. Parts of Absolutes dwell in a sort of willed retardation, with needling noise and vicious screams piled into mindless excess. But tracks like "Bishops" reveal a system to Sightings' seeming shove-off, where all the surge builds and pauses into a coherent dynamic flow. The drums sound like they're outfitted with a dozen contact microphones, and the murky vocals spill out in time with the ceaseless rhythm. In a sense, it's all a big ball of noise, but it also finds corners in which to hide the kind of secrets for which Sightings searches.