by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
Present Tense doesn’t have time for a meet and greet. It opens in media res; percussion bomb blasts, a gristling base, and snaring garage riffs and bloodshot vocals. If you know FACS, and by that I mean Noah Leger’s blown out drums, Alianna Kalaba’s doom drenched bass grooves, and Brian Case’s sputtering ellipses and noise pulses, then you’re already home. Over the past few years, the Chicago trio’s annual dispatches (on Trouble in Mind) have seen significant augmentation that parallel FACS’ previous form, Disappears. Where the latter practically took the post-punk playbook until they arrived at a void-driven strain of post-post-punk, FACS continued tinkering with that strain. Reveling in it enough to the point of becoming both gothic cyborgs and brutalist jam machines. Present Tense continues the fusion of the two that last year’s Void Moments cemented, and the results see them realizing a textured, elastic notion of psychedelia, succinct to this moment.
FACS might strike you as electronic debris, frying and short circuited, but their sound is unabashedly grounded in its rhythms. Both Leger and Kalaba often intertwine their drums and bass lines, tethering the two to a lineage of gothic grooves. The sound is crucial to FACS’ ability to strike such torrentially doomed, yet immensely danceable gazetones, mending Case’s stream of consciousness and referential overtones. Aided on occasion with a vocoder, the vocals are reminiscent of Brainiac’s sputtering droidspeak, but more often than not Case evades easy classification. His unaugmented delivery is already its own cryptid speech pulling objects and details from just beyond this plane. When he talks directly your way though, there’s a sudden shiver of anxiety.
Now as a guitarist, Case carries a swaggering bag of tricks on Present Tense. He’s at his most ample when concocting heady reverb loops that escape and rewarp time. At times sounding as patterned and jagged as a Victorian fencepost (on the title track) or a Wilhem scream caught from outside this mortal coil (on “General Public”). Watching all three come together in the verse, such as on “Strawberry Cough,” is a delicate dance, slinking in controlled chaos. When Case’s vocoder-augmented chorus line drops, all three join in unison to ride wave after wave of shattering bliss, ripping into fray; an all encompassing sensory attack easily the closet they’ve come to producing a dark horse pop song (a la Unwound’s “Corpse Pose”). “Mirrored” in particular, is equitable with the sensory overloads that are accusatory to Fly Pan Am’s recent revival albums.
Yet, a FACS album is not complete without a crackerjack jam, to which “Alone Without” (released for Adult Swim’s singles series last year) is fully encoded into that headspace. Opening with a tectonic drone for its first third, “Alone Without” spends time pacing itself, scanning for a sign of life. When Leger’s drums awaken a third of the way through, Case’s guitar hits a jagged curve and enters a duet against his vocoded, detuning croon. Sitting with those first six minutes, I was entrenched in FACS’ approach being stripped back. Slow, meticulous layering one element after another, until you can catch them all together. In “Alone Without”’s final third, the trio center on an orphic riff, boiling with the intensity of a final boss; now that’s a gospel for the moment.