Four bullets to the head from a shōgun assassin with roots in dnb but fast evolving his own custom strain of minimalist sound-murder. ‘The Centipede’ wears its junglism lightly, but is heavy in all other respects: a kind of low-slung, paranoid gangster-tekno, ultra-dread and dub-cratered, driven by churning subs, batwing-flapping snares and acres of negative space...yeah this owes as much to Skull Disco, duppiest early DMZ and Raime’s Hennail as it does to drum ‘n bass. ‘Menpo’ and ‘OathKeeper' are just as murky and prickly-palm tense, but stretched and flexed and primed for the dance - bass-drones flaring up like mardy cobras, beats fashioned from some impossible alloy of bamboo and hanzo-steel – before all shackles are shaken (shiken?) and total blast-off is achieved with the airtight breaks and teetering death-star synths of 'Oni'. Still living in the hope that Vincent Ward’s insane abandoned treatment for Alien 3 might yet one day be filmed – er, xenormophs vs a brotherhood of 14th century monks orbiting the earth in a wooden space station – and this would be the perfect soundtrack. But let’s not overemphasize its darkside: The Centipede traffics in suspense rather than doom, its violence is carefully portioned, it goes about its biz with stealth rather than brute-force. Execution-style… You’re dead before you know what hit you.
