"
Destruction Unit sacrificed their ears to make this album as loud of a statement as possible. Will you lend them yours?" For once, the grand statement in an album's liner notes is dead on the money -- this psychedelic assault squadron may begin 2015's
Negative Feedback Resistor with two minutes of distant ambient sounds hovering over the horizon, but once "Disinfect" finally kicks in, this music sounds like the equivalent of being tossed headfirst into a deep pit filled with several dozen Marshall amps, all cranked to ten and bleeding feedback.
Destruction Unit intend to use rock & roll as a weapon, and the blunt impact of
Negative Feedback Resistor is towering -- even at a low volume, this album sounds crushingly loud and massive, with the guitars of Ryan Rousseau, J.S. Aurelius, and Nick Nappa joining together as one outsized obelisk of pure sound (reinforced by wailing banks of synthesizers), as Rustin Rousseau lets slip thundering basslines beneath it all and drummer Andrew Flores heroically pounds his kit as he tries to keep up with it all.
Negative Feedback Resistor sounds enormous and gloomy, but the music is powered by a sweaty and furious passion, and while the album's angry liner notes read like a parody of/tribute to the White Panther Party statements on
the MC5's
Kick Out the Jams ("This is crazed-psychedelic-freek-noise guerilla warfare and these are our streets; the pigs of the law can use their system to manipulate and censor our messages...but none of them has been able to make us shut our voices or turn our guitar amps down"), the music absolutely sounds like the real deal. Plenty of bands have talked about bringing down the walls of the city with the power of their music, but
Destruction Unit are one of the few who sound as if they could actually do it, and
Negative Feedback Resistor is music made to smash the state -- or at the very least deafen the enemies of the people. ~ Mark Deming