Raw/lo-fi punk project from NC.Our take: SSSSSSS is a project from Clark Blomquist and Owen Fitzgerald, two longtime participants in North Carolina’s underground music scene. SSSSSSS is fast, noisy, and intense, but the project seems to come at punk and hardcore sideways, taking the paranoid sounds of early industrial music and dragging the BPMs into hardcore range. The drums are electronic, but rather than being sequenced, they’re played live on electronic pads which, along with the punky riffing, makes SSSSSSS sound like a hardcore band that’s been routed through the Matrix. While guitars propelling most songs are pretty straightforward and punk, the vocals are chopped and screwed, bathed in distortion and echo. The electronic drums and distorted vocals recall Big Black in places, but SSSSSSS isn’t coloring inside anyone else’s lines. I like the more straightforward punk songs, but my favorite track is “The Air,” which fuses the mid-tempo hardcore dirge with a sampled vocal track and a synth melody that reminds me of Neu!. If an alien species downloaded a text description of hardcore punk and tried to recreate the music from that, this might be the result.
