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Load Blown is the fourth album by Brooklyn’s Black Dice and their debut on the Animal Collective owned label Paw Tracks, released locally on Mistletone.

The beats drip and roll, tar-pit voices sing into an oil can, and the guitars crank like calliope. Some tunes crackle and burble like submerged television, others bump and click along like a Summer Jam concert series from another dimension.While a noticeable change in tone encompasses Load Blown (some tunes veer close to pop songs), this is a work of over-stimulation, a product of frenzied media culture, a sonic sifting of the gratuitous amount of “stuff” out there.

The span of time (nearly 18 months of on-again/off-again work) encompassing the composition and recording of the album accounts for a sprawling variety of sounds and songs. Strange and abrasive, yet somehow more familiar, accessible, and celebratory than ever, this is Black Dice at their most palatable yet.

mX review:

The Weekend Australian review:

Sydney Morning Herald review:

Black Dice are a revered art-rock outfit, known for their skewed, deconstructed take on pop music. Think of the electronic rock hooks of Radiohead or the delicate synthetic melodies of Aphex Twin, scrunch them into a ball and jam them into a meat-grinder - the end product would probably sound something like this record.

Those just starting out with this legendary Brooklyn outfit should begin with track six, Drool. Similar to the other expansive soundscapes across the album but with playful falling star melodies and squelchy percussive passages, Drool is a relatively fun and easy listen. From there, try Toka Toka, where the bouncing rhythms and off-kilter basslines sound like something from Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory.

More adventurous listeners might like to start on the dense layers of Roll Up, where any hint of melody is processed into a cacophony of revving toy car engines and random raindrops of electronica.

Not for the fainthearted, this album is highly recommended for those searching for the best in sonic exploration and abstract musical art.

Bernard Zuel

From InPress:

From Rave magazine: Extraterrestrial Tones

Mixing alien sounds and familiar rhythms, BLACK DICE’S new Load Blown LP is their party album, BJORN COPELAND tells RICHARD MACFARLANE.

When I put on Black Dice’s new (fourth) record Load Blown, its title became all too appropriate. My body started moving around in strange ways; ways that I don’t think your limbs are meant to go. It’s convulsive, beautiful; Andre Breton said that ‘beauty will be convulsive if not at all’, but actually, scratch that - these sounds aren’t beautiful at all, in fact they’re anything but, they’re alien and you’ll strain to hear and try and figure out where they come from or how they’re made to no avail. This is part of the charm, the aesthetic of the weird and unknown.

“My brother [fellow band member Eric Copeland] was talking about future music. It’s like the idea that somewhere this could have all the ingredients of dance music or party music but the proportions are all really fucked up and the sounds are completely different. It doesn’t subscribe to quite all of the main ingredients of party music but I like the fact that somewhere it could be interpreted like that.”

It could be considered weird, then, that Black Dice release music on DFA (who recently merged with Astralwerks). Load Blown is on Paw Tracks (home to the similarly weird likes of Animal Collective) but it’s their most palatable yet. But the DFA-released previous album Broken Ear Record strangely made sense on their roster; think Factory Records, weird leftfield stuff with some more conventional dance artists on the roster. One track of theirs, “Smiling Off’ was remixed by DFA. It made so much sense; beneath all these fucked up glitches (made with guitars and primitive electronics and other found instruments) lies a strong rhythmic sensibility. Load Blown moves even closer to the beats but it’s not made with the idea of dance music in mind, even if it seems to me that in a parallel universe, people will play it in clubs.

“I think the idea of a party album is definitely more what we were thinking than thinking about dance music. We hit a point where we weren’t really interested in trying to work a live drum sound into it, it was hard just because it started feeling like this really separate entity as everyone got into processing their sounds more and more. In a lot of ways, I feel like it has the nature of the way that we’re just making the rhythms. We never think of it as dance music, but I do like the idea that we tried to make this record have a really strong pop element. Or the equivalent of a pop record, at least. We thought if we recorded everything as a series of singles then everything would have to stand up on its own in a different way to if we’d just gone in and recorded ten songs from scratch. It’s interesting though, a lot of people think its our most difficult record and a lot of others think its bordering on the most accessible one. I like that idea, though; that it’s occupying some weird limbo between those two things.”

It really is an amazing juxtaposition, putting sounds that are so unknown against rhythms that seem so innate. There’s a weird tribal or basic instinct to this; the rhythms are usually fairly simple but disguised by the myriad different sounds that they’re made up of.

“For me, it’s better than sounding like you’re trying to borrow something from a different musical culture, I’ve never really been interested in that. It’s hard for our stuff to sound like other things just because of the instruments that are making it. There are a lot of weird parameters as a result of using a lot of primitive electronics that our outdated at this point. I do like the fact that it can have this innate quality or can seem kind of intuitive.

“It’s interesting when you think about music as being something that is indigenous to every culture, so it makes sense that you should be able to make any type of music and have it appeal to a vast or broad audience just depending on how its made. For us, it’s something that we keep in the back of our heads; you can try and make music that sounds like something from another country or something really old and primitive you can tell that there’s a logic too it, even if it has a foreign feel to it, you don’t understand whats making the sounds or if it’s a ceremonial or festive purpose; that grey area can be a really exciting place to be, moreso than just being a dance rock band or a power violence band. It’s something we’ve wanted to define ourselves by as we’ve gone along.”

Understandably, it was hard as a band starting out to get shows because of the abrasive and confronting nature of their sounds. They’ve been doing it eleven years and are coming from a place of just being exciting to be able to make music even if it was just in someone’s basement. Now, they play everywhere from large rock venues to clubs to the same old divey DIY spaces. They’ve got as much fervor, if not more, even if they’ve chilled out just a little bit. Live shows and recording now sees a lot less aggravation from band and audience.

“There are shows where people actually do dance. Its interesting because things are regular but there are always these hiccups or awkward qualities to it that are a result of our taste and the parameters of the shit we’re playing. There are definitely shows where people are sitting with their arms crossed or spacing out to the projections. There have been a number of people to have seizures at shows as a result of the sounds and the visuals being really strobey. People will pick fights sometimes. That’s one the most frustrating parts about it but also what keeps it interesting for us; I really can’t predict it from night to night. The type of energy getting reflected back onto us is always a real mystery. It’s liberating to know what anything could happen.”

Cyclic Defrost review:

Black Dice have always sounded like a bunch of kids tooling around with guitar effects pedals. But to some extent focussing on their approach misses the point. Yes they do belong to those legions of pedal heavy knob twiddling noise geeks, yet it’s what they do with their knobs that has always separated them from the pack. Much of Load Blown initially separates the parts, identifying three or so rumbles, throbs, feedback loops etc and then proceeds to spend the remainder of the piece integrating them to the point where they sound like one strangely twitchy mechanical beast. Arrangement is high on the agenda, even bizarre off kilter melodies occasionally spring up, as they spread their sounds across the frequency spectrum. These pieces sound like they were borne out of jams, as the rhythm is established early and doesn’t change, and elements tend to come in and out, building into a almost hypnotic intensity. It’s the ritualistic approach, building on the throb, and it works well here. Whilst there’s a certain melodic, dare I say pop element to their soupy arrangements, there’s even the odd batch of heavily treated warbling vocals on Cavenger, which echoes the cheeky stomp of their touring companions Animal Collective. But don’t expect something even remotely as friendly. Despite their increasing yen towards melodic cuteness, it’s still quite slight and their noisiness, percussive leanings and abstract repetative sense of structure never really allow them to escape their reputation for weirdness. Not that you’d want them to, as on Load Blown they’ve got the mix between abrasiveness and melody just right.

Bob Baker Fish

From Rave magazine:

Speculative fiction for the avant-garde

It’s weird to think that a lot of people will be entirely repulsed by this new Black Dice record. The rhythms that lie beneath the alien electronic glitches and foreign textures are so intuitive, like dance music from another planet. Granted, you’re probably not going to be dancing to this like you would to something actually categorized as such, but it’s hard not to move your body. It has a strange effect, you’re torn between scratching your head over the origin of the sounds and wondering why at the same time it makes so much sense. Take Scavenger for instance, which starts off with ambience reminiscent of an industrial sci-fi film soundtrack, but then a subtle but sure bassline emerges, subterranean and dark, the repetitive rhythms becoming infectious amidst a wash of glowing sounds unknown. Then it’s back to the ambience and into the next track, gathering momentum with an assured rhythmic sensibility that runs throughout the album with a surprising amount of variation.

Crafted with primitive electronics and guitars and a myriad of different pedals, there’s a human instinct and sense of the homemade behind it all. It’s not so relentless as to totally alienate, just enough to get your brain ticking as well as your heart.

Black Dice still belong in the DIY basement space, but with Load Blown they’ve made their most accessible yet. There’s a lot to grasp onto here (beats, especially) and a lot to get lost within. It’s self-consciously ‘future music’, pushing forward with a necessary sense of optimism despite their fucked-up and often challenging aesthetics.

RICHARD MACFARLANE (4½ stars)

Three Thousand review:

Black Dice are completely sublimated, Shinto-like, in the teeming hive of sounds on new album, Load Blown. The New York trio’s ‘ecological’ concerns (their words) have never been answered better than this – each track is a close-up look at the surface of some new, virulent and electronic ant-hill. There’s something paganistic about their artificial powers of regeneration; it’s a freaked-out, amoral and thrilling feeling of the music being somehow half-animal / half-machine. Black Dice are like those islanders in The Wickerman who perversely worship nature, but instead are given over to the embodying powers of electronic music.

Fans will expect as much, not only as a one-up from 2002’s watershed post-noise album Creature Comforts, but also because Load Blown takes in tracks from the recent Roll Up / Drool and Manoman 12″ EPs. The open-ended format and communicative bubbling and gurgling of the former is like the album overall – sheets of trebly static roll across sampled drunk guitar, synthetic balloon rubbing and, four minutes into the track, the huge revving sounds of a broken, sit-in arcade driving game. Kids nowadays would do better dropping acid to this, than to Microcosmos or Koyaanisqatsi.

By Mark Gomes