Portland’s Conditioner Disco Group (once simply known as Conditioner) are back with an extended name and a long-awaited new self-titled album. Due out April 12th via Sweden’s Maternal Voice Records, the post-punk band continue to the elastic tight insistency of Suggested Use with caustic precision and animated yelps.
The band’s upcoming album, The Glare of Success is a reimagining of Bag of Holding in a way, reworking ideas and pieces of the once melodic wonder into something mind-bending, warped, and unequivocally new. While their may be familiar aspects, this record its own monster, a disorienting drift into dub rhythms, divergent compositions, manipulated layers, and what the label calls “musical recycling.”
After a flurry of exceptional introductory releases comes Salt, the band’s meticulous full length debut, an album with enough jaw-dropping moments you might as well just leave your damn mouth open. Blending together fractured shards of garage punk, krautrock, post-hardcore, and experimental no-wave, Blessed’s sound is laser-beam focused and expanded further in every direction on their first attempt at album length exploration.
Since the inception of the band, the quartet has pushed and prodded from album to album, refining their style, focus, and jumping in new directions as inspiration takes them from one shift to another. If you ask the band, their upcoming fourth album, Do This Again Tomorrow, has found the sweet spot they’ve been looking for all along.
Fans of Rock with a Capital R will find a lot to love in the song’s first 30 seconds or so, as it opens up with a tunefully slanted riff and familiar trampling drums. By the end of the song’s five minutes, however, the listener has a fuller understanding of the disparate parts that make up Hansen’s impressively varied musical palette.
Built on gentle electronics and meditative synths, the project of Ben Ronsenbach is both lush and evolving. “Sunrise” is the record’s sleek finale, a song that opens with back-masked melodies that dissolve in the distance, making way to an atmospheric fog and an 8-bit sounding synth progression that stings over the layered mix.
