WHITE MICE : GANJAHOVADOSE
20 Buck Spin
My promo sheet tells me “musically speaking one might hear traces of Godflesh… yet they (White Mice) easily stand apart from any proper comparison”. Yeah, no shit. Let’s take a clearer run at this “description” lark. Imagine you were abducted by mouse-headed aliens, who zipped you away to their toilet-bowl home planet and fed you drugs intravenously while their sun self-destructed. Imagine you were an amoeba, whose only means of expressing bile-soaked, piss-infected hatred for the one true god was a kind of microplanktonic flailing, which, as it happens, sounds like feedback holocaust to all other amoebas. Imagine your effects pedal fucked another effects pedal, and then the demented offspring fucked the original pedal once more, to prove out some twisted, weed-soaked, primeval genetic engineering theory. Then they all sang a song. I’m not even close yet.
“Ganjahovadose” is excretal, sanity-defying, grind-sludge noise, all industrial-electronic howling and searing, brain-damagingly repetitive bass shapes, heavy, nasty, inhuman and captivating in a really ugly way. Tricky, uncomfortable percussion underpins, manic on tracks such as “Passsthefissst”, weird and unpredictable on “The Crapture”, perfectly appropriate to the artistic endeavour but not really digestible by the regular human mind. The accepted structure, in as much as there is one, is to string out one huge, messed-up shape, for want of a better word (it’s not a ‘riff’ and oh mother of god it’s not a ‘theme’ or a ‘movement’), mashing it into a sleazy, alien, swampy mess of distortion, oscillation and uncontrollable bodily functions.
Despite the relentless, grinding nastiness of these tracks, they’re all distinctive, punctuated by the sneering, snarling vocals of frontman Mouseeattongue (hey, you fucking asked) and random sampling, including, irrelevantly and rather fittingly, the voice of the cop who called in his own death after eating hash brownies. The tracks are messy, homicidal noise-sculptures, but there’s not to say there’s no rhyme here. Plenty of rhyme. Just minimal reason.
This is a good thing. White Mice have honed this sound over five previous albums, and “Ganjahovadose” was mastered by HiWatt Marshall – they know what they’re about, they know it might lodge itself right up the nasal cavity of metal’s hydra-headed commentariat, and they’re gleefully happy to go ahead anyway. I would absolutely love to witness this mind-fuck live, and if rumour does indeed have it, I might get my way in the near future. Listening to “Ganjahovadose” brings to mind that friend with the outrageous music taste (Satanic Muttley, then), and makes you shout out “ZOMG, wait until they hear…”, a sentence interrupted when you fall over your copious drugs paraphernalia and crap yourself. Magic.
83/100
ELLEN SIMPSON
