ALBUM REVIEWS

Castrovalva
S/T MINI ALBUM
BREW RECORDS 4.5.09
@www.vanguard-online.co.uk

 There is a LOT of noise here in a very packed twenty minutes. It’s a great big thundery squall of fuzzed up bass, noise manipulation and drums. Hard to believe it is a duo sometimes but, then, this band comes from Leeds where noiseniks like That Fucking Tank and the mighty Bilge Pump do their thing. It’s not all Kaisers and Pigeons, you know….

Castrolva sit somewhere between the furious abstractions and destructions of labels like Neurot and Southern and the intent fury of maths rock. I find it altogether healthy that the third track is improvised and recorded in one take. Also that the sixth is named after an art-comic and that the rest are fancy-pants artsy names for crunking lumps of rhythm section noise.

The louder it goes, the better it sounds. Live, I suspect they’d be verging on the unpleasantly in-your-face.
Excellent.

Ross McGibbon

www.brewrecords.net