Keeping up the the Hozac's is a nearly a full-time job -- and being that I have a few other jobs to fulfill on a daily basis, I mistakenly tuned out the label for much of the second half of this year. Besides the excellent Fungi Girls debut LP, I couldn't really tell you what's going on up in Chicago. The singles club still functions, the releases come at a rapid clip, and as a result a lot of great things there get lost in the shuffle. One such single comes from Sweden's Black Bug. Their Police Helicopters EP is one of those occasions for the label to delve into the gnarliest, darkest corners of cold wave. This is as black as they come. It's perfectly reminiscent of the Human League before they became "Human" with possibly a splash of Napalm Death -- if only for that bands hyper-blasts. The drum machines here are cranked to that setting, and left on auto-pilot. Throughout there are space-punk sci-fi shouts (think 1984) battling with the droid overlords. The synths keep up, speeding to a colorful paranoia. One has the feeling that as automaton as Black Bug sounds they could certainly conjure some hooks from those machines. Like an 8-bit Cramps or Suicide plopped into the middle of one of those endless Metroid dungeons. This is decrepit, scummy, vile, noise terrorism quite worthy of the three or four minutes you'll spend with the duo. Not sure I could handle this as a full-length (maybe if they kept it under 15 minutes?)
Here's a vid for the single's title track:
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