Have you ever been to a modern art museum and seen a sculpture or painting and wondered, Why?"" Maybe it was something along the lines of a naked man with three arms and one eye carved out of limestone playing checkers. More likely it was 20 tomato soup cans painted funny colors and lined up in a row. Ever come out of one of those rare forays into such art completely dissatisfied? In avant-garde art, it's assumed that if you don't like it, then you obviously don't understand it. But the fact remains that you don't like it.
Black Dice, as a mind-bending sonic experiment, fall neatly into this polarizing category. They stitch a blanket of unrelated sounds into a neat structure with little melody and even less coherence. But that is probably the point. Get it? It's supposed to be weird. But to what end is a question only a select few listeners will understand, especially with their latest record, _Load Blown.
The album begins with a song titled ""Kokomo,"" which sounds uncannily like the Beach Boys version, that is, if we substituted Brian Wilson for _Metal Machine Music_-era Lou Reed and the rest of the Beach Boys for R2D2 and the robot from ""Lost in Space"" - a combination with far more musical talent their human counterparts in the band.
Odd electronic noises ebb and flow steadily over a beat keeping time in the background. This is not your steady bass drum, snare, hi-hat beat, however, but rather any number of other eccentric and spacey noises. There is grinding, hissing, whirrs, static, boops, beeps, sweeps, creeps and what at one point sounds like a car horn.
The rest of the album is similarly chaotic and plodding. It is hard to discern any specific highs or lows when listening to what amounts to rhythmless paranormal noise with only the faintest hint of 1980s Isao Tomita-style electronica. The last two tracks, ""Bananas"" and ""Manoman,"" especially drift toward this Tomita-inflected hypnotic approach that is truly effective. The problem is that these final ""songs"" are preceded by 35 minutes of nonsensical meandering.
It is as if these four Brooklyn natives sat down with a bunch of synthesizers, set up so that when a key was hit some atypical noise gushed forth, and simply pressed down in a random yet steady fashion. There is no emotion, no hook, no story, no rhyme and certainly no reason, just technical manipulation. This is muzak for robots or the soulless, unless of course you have some incisive insight into the mind of post-modern avant-garde.
