Noise! Yes kids, the ugly baron of unsavory misanthropy has once again reared its ugly head and dropped a load of nasty upon your tender ears. Noise is perhaps the most accurately named genre in all of contemporary music. The shit is noisy.

Chris Forgues, operating under his pseudonym, Kites, has created in this, his fourth release for Load, a motherfucker of an album. It might be good to know that he also created this work all within the confines of his 4-tracked mind, without the aid of computers, or other digital devices. He is an analogue renaissance man, apparently. Whatever he is, it?s working.

This is glorious, direct, and confrontational noise. It?s all that, but it?s also delicious in a way that lets you know the creator is not just twiddling knobs and giggling into the folded recesses of his turtleneck sweater. This guy has an ear for his craft and the end result is a threatening mass of throbbing hiss and screech and menace and muscle that draws you in while tearing you apart.

I am not usually a big fan of noise; the abrasive - for the sake of being abrasive - childishness tends to run tedious for me. It?s a hazard of the occupation for these noise fellows to run their own ideas so very close to the obvious that it eventually ends up aground, roasting in the unforgiving rays of overtly conservative mockery. Anything that makes the audience say, ?I can do this!? is a magnet for morons. But, like anything else, there are those who do it, and then there are those who do it right. Forgues does it right.

Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys strong, adventurous music of any sort. 8/10 -- John Cramer (22 January, 2008)