CD review: Imperial China's 'Phosphenes'
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IMPERIAL CHINA
"Phosphenes"
Kindred spirits: Battles, Mission of Burma, Fugazi
Show: With Grimace Federation, the State Department and Peanut Butter & Dave at on Friday at the Rock & Roll Hotel. Show starts at 9 p.m. 202-388-7625. http:/
Beginning with inexorable drumbeats and guitar-chord crunches, Imperial China's new release, "Phosphenes," immediately establishes that this D.C. trio plays visceral hard rock. But the album is college-educated hard rock, as the song titles indicate. The opening track, "All That Is Solid," takes its name from Marx and Engels, and "Phosphenes" are those glimmers of light you sometimes see when your eyes are closed.
Words aren't central to this music, though. The vocals are usually buried in the mix, and large swathes of the album proceed without any at all, suggesting the music of primarily instrumental art-punk bands such as Battles. Like those groups, Imperial China retains mainstream rock's punch while incorporating elements of more experimental styles. The trio undergirds its attack with loops and other synthetic sounds, and borrows from non-Western forms, notably for the gamelan-like percussion of "Corrupting the Integrity of the Grid."
The band does chill out occasionally, as during the first part of "Go Where Airplanes Go." But such downshifts only accentuate the vigor of most of the album, which includes moments that recall hardcore punk's shout-it-out ferocity. The chant of "we are phosphenes" in "Invincible" is not exactly "we will rock you," but Imperial China gives it just as much power.
-- Mark Jenkins