The Machinist - Towers
- Dark Juan
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Self-Released
Release Date: 07.04.26
Running Time: 24:01
Review by Dark Juan
Score: 478,666,986,274,671,323/10
Today’s written nonsense is brought to you by several things – Crow Cottage required a new vacuum cleaner. This has caused much hilarity because Dark Juan’s sense of humour has not evolved much beyond being a teenage boy. Farts are still funny. Anyway, the new appliance came with something they have called a crevice nozzle.
I have been sniggering for two weeks.
Still, I have not been as usually prolific as I normally am because I have been being Stress of the D’Urbervilles at work and Mrs Dark Juan has been struck down by some kind of uncomfortable malady that has laid her low and rendered any speech from her into incomprehensible nanna phrases. However, we watched that Louis Theroux documentary about the pitiful man children who haven’t got a single fucking braincell to share between them and think that squandering £2.5k a WEEK on a villa in Marbella is a fucking FLEX, when in reality it just shows them up as being very financially imprudent and silly, and Mrs Dark Juan commented that the best bit of the entire thing was a lizard she saw on a tree, thereby proving that females with Autism Spectrum Disorders just hit different. I merely shouted at the television. A lot. I nearly spilled my beer.
I was more amused by the ladies of the internet who labelled that ilk as Lawrence(s) of Dry Labia. I had a good chuckle at that.
In other news, our pug Ivy (named Ivy The Terrible by the lovely Pip and Dan, our dog walkers) has finally learned to give her paw after three months of constant training. However, we now have a problem. You know how Dark Juan preaches love and understanding for all, regardless of race, religion, sexual preference or gender identification? You wouldn’t think so when Ivy gives her paw. It’s like a full chested Nazi salute. The leg is held rigid, and it doesn’t help because she is black and looks like the fucking mascot of an SS battalion.
I am ashamed, and therefore we will subsume that shame in some form of musical punishment and I have just the thing in The Machinist’s latest EP, “Towers”. Now I have had this EP in my possession for quite some time as I am on cordial terms with main man John T but have not had time to listen to it. We will rectify this now.
The Platter of Splatter ™ has been cornered and corralled and the disc reverently placed upon it.
The Machinist’s aggressive tendencies and their ability to weld Tech Death, Black Metal and Industrial together with a strong Gothic edge makes them the amalgamation of many musical things that lift Dark Juan from his usual morass of misanthropic misery, and combine this with the fact that the tyranny of winter appears to have temporarily passed in the Calder Valley and the baleful eye in the sky is giving me a useful vitamin boost as well as no longer being cold, I am feeling quite pleasantly disposed towards the band at the moment.
The EP opens with ‘Sagittarius In Bloom’ and the band are not fucking about at all. They explode out of the headphones from a dead stop with a machine-gun tempo and heaviness that instantly crushes the poor unsuspecting music critic to the ground and then starts kicking with fucking big hobnailed boots. However, in true The Machinist fashion there is more than mere brutality and savagery to offer the currently severely injured listener. The vocals equally contravene the Geneva Convention by refusing to take any prisoners and buzzsaw their way straight to the backbrain before engaging in a bit of impromptu surgery involving teeth and talons. More Trad Death then Tech Death at first, The Machinist then take us on a particularly nasty musical odyssey through extremity with movements that encompass Electronic Industrial realms, more than a nod and a wink towards the stygian splendour of Goth and the finger flaying fretboard finagling of Tech Death.
It's fair to say the Manc lads (every band has a downside. Dark Juan is from Yorkshire and therefore anything from the wrong side of the Pennines is a worry) are a teensy bit on form. The guitar work of George and Tobias is dangerously razor-edged but has the weight of several tons of armoured battlewagon behind it. And although the drums are sequenced, it’s difficult to tell that they are apart from a very flat sounding bass drum and low tom.
‘Of Creation and Cancer’ is up next and this is where The Machinist really excel, vocals ranging from sepulchral depths to Jeff Walker-esque acid snarling are slammed against the kind of Tech Death that Necrophagist would be proud of and the resulting (and phenomenally ugly and dangerous) chimera is unleased on the listener. It is even more extreme than the opening song, with edged, screaming-at-the-point-of-catastrophic-failure electronics underpinning the hyperspeed velocities the band effortlessly attain. It is bleak and concrete with steel rebar poking through the cracks and heavier than the moon with your mum on it – until the song then takes us off into the outer reaches of interstellar space with swooping electronics and a disturbing piece of percussion. And then we are back, crash landing into ice encrusted Nordic forests with all kinds of howling predators at your heels in a mad flight for survival. A little bit of Techno starts to creep in under the guitars as the tension builds and builds and builds…
‘Cellular Catharsis’ closes out the EP (apart from the paragraph below) and this is where the more Technical Death Metal elements of the music of The Machinist come to the fore, coruscating guitar work cutting cleanly through the artillery barrages of rapid-fire percussion and the demented roaring, howling and screaming of John T’s prodigious throat. Yet there is room for the music to breathe, as the band slow everything down and go almost neon-dripping Synthwave on a break in the music until it is time to remind the listener just what the fuck they are dealing with and drag them off down the paths of martial Black Metal instead. With a rather worrying Jazz element in parts as well.
That’s just in the first five minutes of a ten-minute epic.
Now, because John T is a kind person and has taken pity on Dark Juan for his many years of ardent and deeply embarrassing fangirling, he also sent me a piece that does not feature on the EP as released. I am not going to name it because John has plans for it, but I will just say that it is a vastly different piece of music compared to the usual red-in-tooth-and claw fare The Machinist offer, yet it is something that resonates deeply within Dark Juan and I am gratified that John thought of me and included it.
To sum these three tracks up then – its fair to say that The Machinist have not lost any of their edge and power, but they have increased the level of their explorations of music, and their songs contain many movements that take you down roads seldom travelled by bands whose primary business is extremity. This is a VERY Good Thing that adds texture and dimension to music that could become listless if it was to just continue in the same vein of relentless brutality.
I love The Machinist even more after hearing this record and they deserve to be absolutely fucking colossal.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System has once more sedated Dark Juan on the instructions of Mrs Dark Juan, who has claimed she could hear him fiendishly jabbering with no discernible syllabification over the TV in the bedroom, where she is ensconced in her bed of pain and has told him to shut the fuck up otherwise he will be able to change TV channels with his arse. In that spirit, then, we award The Machinist 478,666,986, 274,671,323/10 for a fucking amazing EP. Even though marks were deducted because it was only an EP and it is simply not a sufficient quantity of The Machinist for my tastes. But that’s just because I am greedy and always want more.
TRACKLISTING:
Sagittarius in Bloom
Of Creation and Cancer
Cellular Catharsis
LINE-UP:
John T - Vocals, bass, synths, drum programming
Tobias Gray - Guitars
George Kal – Guitars
LINKS: