sly & the family drone: walk it dry

London's kings of noise Sly & The Family Drone follow up their 2019 Love Love LP Gentle Persuaders with Walk It Dry, an eight-track LP collaboratively released by Love Love Records in the UK and Feeding Tube Records in the USA. Walk It Dry utilizes the familiar sound palette of scronked electronics, bulging noise blasts, wailing sax, and Kalashnikov drums that was found on Gentle Persuaders but is a very a different beast. The tracks here are shorter and punchier as the band digs deeper than ever to find increasingly potent sonic pockets. Bolstered with a directional force rare in this strain of noise the album begins at the deep end with "A Black Uniformed Strutting Animal", a raucous cacophony backed by a thick groove, before the bleeps and bloops of "Dead Cat Chaos Magician" kick in, sounding like a haunting in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. "Swearing On The Horns" is a folk-sludge ditty scraping through a psychic wormhole that exits at the feet of "Bulgarian Steel" -- a grimacing march punctuated with metallic screams where the sax becomes an overstressed alarm siren. "Shrieking Grief", with its rapid fire drum rolls and megaton payloads of pummeling noise, concludes the A side loudly. Side B opens with stretched-out droning layers and winding loops on "Sunken Disorderly", providing a gloomy refuge for some cosmic meditation. The album at this point converges into the morbidly fascinating black-and-white horror of "My Torso Is A Shotgun", perhaps the most widescreen and immediate example of the band's progression, before playing out with the deathly lament of "Tsukiji". A suitable soundtrack to the end-times.