So if the glamorous, prestigious and accessible band Liturgy can get away with calling themselves "transcendental black metal" and be taken seriously, then
QUIT is a free jazz post-punk band made up of bitter nihilists living in a world without redemption.
Here is some heavy instrumentals that are downright anti social! Brutally lazy and primitive but effective walls of open chords played to exhaustion. Moments of blissful childish narcissism galore ... the players go into their own Hendrix worlds and collide accidentally through jazz. There is complete and utter unrecognition of the other players at times. Loud and clear, QUIT has no desire to impress an audience, but Blondie, K and Jim still have the audacity to record such a session displaying an admirable level of musical freedom and experimentation.
What makes Quit stick out in the world of freak out jams and metal "clear the hall" blast beaters is their complete lack of distortion or fuzz. The amplifiers reverberate, change in frequency, wah wah around and pick up whale call feedback, but rarely do they ever feel dirty, rough or sleezy. THey do, however, sound broken. This is also what makes QUIT special.
The juxtaposition of clean tones with loudly strummed guitars gives an impression of lost sanity in traffic ala Michael Douglas in "Falling Down". The amplifiers are set to wedding band. I imagine the musicians dressed up in tie with their collared shirts tucked in, and then rebel with the most furious sonic attack.
Blondie's rhythms are not complex and do not challenge the limits of tempo or multiplicity in drums, but they are played with strength and consistency. They slowly morph from a heavy bass jazz 4/4 rhythm to high energy tribal tom tom dances accented by symbols. And then at times they allow themselves to powerfully accompany drone.
QUIT is welterweight in tone compared to the Mountains and Lightning Bolts of the world, but all the musicians showcase a fierce desire to demonstrate and narrate an enormous amount of negative musical content. Their clean tone complements their downbeat and disturbed improvised compositions, an irony subtly thrown in a deeply sincere cassette.
At points this cassette gets a little space madness. If I was listening to this in the shower I may think that the bar of soap is actually an ice cream bar. Through my drugged and whiskey soaked haze of nihilistic oblivion the shower would lose gravity and I would become weightless, which in reality would actually be just my knees giving out. The moral of that story is if you're black out drunk always take a shower instead of a bath in case you lose consciousness.
Lost my train of thought. Anyway, this cassette sounds like a jazzy nightmare. I really liked it for what it was. Sometimes I feel bad doing these reviews because people send me these really well considered singer songwriter tapes with well over 20 fairly well considered and constructed songs on them, all edited and mixed and mastered and blah blah blah. But it looked like these guys were calling out for help in some way shape or form. I hope QUIT is doing alright. Your cassette is bleak. We hope you guys the best. Your cassette is a solid B+.
-- Jack Turnbull
www.jackturnbull.com
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