Artist: Nonlinear.System.Theory
Album: Fourier’s Outrage
Type: Album
Label: Subsound Records
Here we have Nonlinear.System.Theory, another Italian avant-garde electronic rock band who have signed up to Subsound Records. Taking Mike Patton’s weirdness, a plethora of seemingly random sound clips (random Italian speech, video game sounds – all sorts) and mixing it in with grooving rhythms would be too straight forward for these guys, so they decided to heap in tons of other musical genres into the melting pot to keep their songwriting ADHD placated.
Though this really isn’t for me, the band have a fairly good understanding of song structuring and a decent grasp on dynamics to keep your attention from waning. However, the thing I don’t get is the seeming fascination with Super Mario Bros. they have on two of the album’s earlier tracks ‘The Hunger of Luigi’ and ‘Luigi ate Daemon’. Perhaps I’m missing something, perhaps it’s some band in-joke, but to me – it’s pure ‘What the fuck?!’ city. A few tracks (‘My Shiver’ in particular comes to mind) remind me of Ulver main-man’s side project Head Control System, with the commercial beats, distorted-yet-safe guitar chugs and catchy saccharine choruses, though this lot certainly have the edge when it comes to irregular musical form (you could almost say they put the ‘mentalism’ into experimentalism). On the title track there’s even a few reminiscent guitar lines to those purveyed by the likes of System of a Down for a brief moment, until the foaming synths wash through, soaking the proceedings their weird outlandish atmospheres.
If you love piano-led choruses that make way for pure synthesiser masturbation, before sweeping into an accordion-led fairground song with accompanying vocals you’d expect to hear in a cheesy Italian restaurant – this would be right up your street. Mr Bungle would be proud.
www.myspace.com/nlstheory
Lars Christiansen
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