Oxidized

Frontierer

Imagine. You're in a secret underground mutant holding facility working a boring desk job where you just look at cameras all day. Suddenly, there is a massive breach in the facility and all the deadly mutants have been released. Between the explosions, the deafening alarms, futuristic weapons being discharged, the violent screams for help, and the sound of your own beating heart, the noise is so incredibly oppressive. You can't escape it. You're locked in. The only thing you can do is curl up into a ball in the corner and wait until your time is up. That is about the most apt description I can come up with to define the sound and the feeling of Frontierer's music. It is terrifying, disorienting, and unless you actually are locked in a mutant holding facility waiting to die, it is more exhilarating than any amusement park ride on Earth.

No one sounds like Frontierer. No one is pushing the sonic extremity to the lengths these psychotic reprobates are, and if I misspoke, I would love to hear who goes harder. For this, the band scores major points. However, there is a caveat, and at the risk of making a lot of people mad, I must say the band is very one-dimensional. Every quality that makes the opening track Heriloom so fantastic can be applied to literally every other track on this record. Once you've heard thirty seconds of a Frontierer song, you've heard their whole discography. Now that sounds harsh so let me reiterate that I love just about every track on this record to death, but I think the reason why I love every track so much is because they are fundamentally indistinguishable.

I struggle to find things that make certain songs stick out from the others, but I'll at least give it a shot. Glacial Plasma, at least to my ears, has very busy kick drum work. Rattling off so many furious blasts that if someone actually performed that, that is insanely impressive. There's a section on Daydark where there's a bit of a reprieve from the chaos. We get these intermittent shots of kick drum, cymbals, and guitar explosions that just kind of ride out; it is one of the few moments where we get a sense of space even though the sound is still menacing as hell. The vocals are a little more upfront, allowing you to hear more nuance in the screams, and it sounds like it hurts.

The track that stands out the most is definitely SVVANS which has more of a digital hardcore thing going on with the sequenced percussion and digital noise edits. While it's nice that this does offer a change of pace, a new sound, this was one of the few tracks I didn't find all that compelling. Towards the end, we have The Damage and The Sift, which by this point, my ears have tapped out. The high-pitched wail that kicks the track off and returns occasionally throughout, is the one instance where this type of sound the band frequently employs is incredibly grating. And I guess this leads me to my final criticism. While I love and praise Frontierer's unique, oppressive sound, sitting through this for fifty minutes is a real challenge. Ear fatigue can set in quick even when played at the most modest of volumes. As I said before, I love just about every track on this thing, but I can see myself throwing all these songs onto a 'loved' playlist that gets randomly shuffled as opposed to listening to this album from front to back. I need Frontierer in smaller, more regulated doses - like an I.V. drip - for my sanity.