Black Dice – 'Mr Impossible' review
Black Dice began their career as anarchic thrash noiseniks 15 years ago, performing abrupt, aggressive music designed to piss people off. In the context of antagonistic punk, that’s an admirable aim, but once you subtract the fury and antagonism and add badly played electronics, you’re left with the postmodern equivalent of a smirking kid singing “I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves” while he fumbles around with Battles’ live instruments.
And unfortunately, that’s pretty much where Black Dice find themselves with Mr Impossible: their sixth LP is an aural mess that certainly retains the ability to piss people off, but contains neither the bile to make it thrilling, nor the structure or subtlety to make it intellectually arresting. Instead, Mr Impossible is the musical equivalent of an internet troll – antagonistic for the sake of it, irritating in short bursts and plain tedious in longer ones, with very little to say (and paper thin intelligence with which to say it) behind this impulsive nonsense.
1/10
