Little George Bush was big for American noise. During his eight years in the White House, a glorious din poured from the underground’s every corner, caterwauling responses to wars and world orders built on lies. It was an extended heyday for harshness that doubled as an escape hatch—the rock deconstructions of Mouthus, the ecstatic roar of Growing, the crackling tectonics of Yellow Swans. Where No Fun documented the subterranean groans of New York, Not Not Fun broadcast its wonderfully garish West Coast cousins. Lightning Bolt felt like guerilla fighters, Sunn O))) like rebellious sages, Merzbow and Jazkamer and Birchville Cat Motel like blessed international allies. Not everyone had an ambient project yet, and new age was old news. Noise felt necessary, urgent.
In New Zealand, though, the guitarist Roy Montgomery largely sat that moment out. Montgomery had long been one for disappearing; soon after his band, the Pin Group, released the first-ever single on the great label Flying Nun in 1981, he seemingly vanished for a decade. What’s more, the music he made after returning in the mid-’90s was rarely savage. Scenes from the South Island and Temple IV were instead skeletal, beautiful, and haunted, the bittersweet transmissions of a man who had left home to process the loss of a lover and stumbled into two landmarks. His four-track compositions felt like frames for walls of noise, not the noise itself. When he didn’t release music from 2001 until 2010, it was as if he simply stepped aside for the kids who coveted his delicate work and let them rage. This wasn’t his fight.
No score yet, be the first to add.
He does not cede the same ground on Guitars Infernal, the most obliterative music of his career and an invigorating throwback to the harsh glories of this millennium’s start. “This album is dedicated to the late planet Earth before it overheated,” reads the epitaph on the back cover. Montgomery recorded these nine instrumentals in 2016, as it seemed his world and ours were splitting open. Never mind elections or Brexit. His longtime partner and the mother of his children, Kerry McCarthy, was battling cancer. And along the Alpine Fault at the edge of two tectonic plates, New Zealand suffered a string of cataclysmic earthquakes, including one that prompted scientists to reconsider the way they worked. Montgomery turned on his Tascam digital 8-track and, in pieces named to memorialize a flammable planet, let out the rage.
Even at his most forlorn, Montgomery always had a knack for melody, the very thing that makes these nine onslaughts more memorable than some pure miasma. At the start of “Pyromantic Ideation,” he plays a quick little lick, like a blues guitarist warming up for a gig. For the next six minutes, rivers of distortion rise and fall and weave around the line, as if Montgomery has pushed the listener’s ear against a badly blown speaker. But he never lets go of that riff, clutching it even as the rest of his world drowns in static.
