by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Boston based quartet Rong are making bugged out music for these bugged out times. Void of subtlety, the band carve into the impenetrable weight of society’s dissolution with a sound as brilliant as it is overtly chaotic. Sociopolitically minded but never heavy handed, there’s a definable rage found in their contextual carnage, but Rong don’t feel indebted to their indignation. There’s a sense that despite it all, the band are having a damn good time, creating freaked out noise punk in the name of artistic catharsis. The best heavy music lives deep in weirdness, the spaces where aggression is met with sparks of creative freedom, delivered with an urgency that suggests everything could very well come unglued at any moment. Since their earliest recordings back in 2018, Rong have made a home in that mentality, opting to embrace the strange and the unpredictable in a way that feels vividly engaged and wildly inventive.
Existing decidedly on the fringes, Rong’s explosive sound splices and dices together bits and pieces of noise rock, art punk, post-hardcore, and experimental metal to form something delightfully alien. The abrasion is tantamount, an oozing eruption of caterwauling guitars, jaw dropping rhythms, and vocals yelped with fury and resolve. Following a full length record and two splits, Rong capture their combustive energy with Live At New Alliance, recorded live in the Somerville, MA studio last December in celebration of a gallery opening. It’s a live album, but it’s also a studio album, the clarity of the recording a testament to the latter. The set revolves primarily around unreleased music, and it feels like a revelation to hear these songs played with raw unfiltered immediacy.
Rong contort themselves in extremes, like pulling a lion from a hat while suspended mid-air on a tightrope, or performing open heart surgery on one of those old rickety rope bridges. The inherent sense of danger is always colliding headfirst with a magical dexterity, stomping and skronking one moment only to sputter and twitch the next on songs like “Millennial Hell” and the cyclone havoc of “Fake Fate”. Bent in a million different directions with an elasticity that never seems to snap, the quartet of Adric Giles (drums), OWB (vocals), George Hooper (guitars), and Max Goldstein (bass) have an uncanny symbiosis, playing off each other in a way that places equal emphasis on every piece of the puzzle. For all the rampant chaos in their songs, Rong retain structure and a seismic poise.
Stampeding against hypocrisy, wealth inequality, and scientific indifference amid environmental collapse, songs like “Spiritual Advi$or” and “Dayglo Future Leak” emerge from knotted progressions with artistic aplomb. Even as they rattle our senses, the band never sound muddy, they never feel out of step, all is exactly as it should be, swirling within a mangled and intelligently deranged kaleidoscope of acidic obliteration. The dust never has a chance to settle, but Rong’s impact is best experienced from inside the eye of the storm.