Review Summary: A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine...
2016 has been a massive year for Sutcliffe Jugend. After dropping off the map near the tail end of 2012, nobody really knew what the Power Electronics duo would create and when that creation would be released. Of course the group's secrecy when it came to their work didn't help calm fan anxieties either. Around April of 2016, with almost no prior announcement, a trilogy of records were released to the public. What resulted was hundreds of SJ fans pouring over the trilogy, desperate to uncover its secrets and understand what SJ spent four years making, and creating some of the biggest buzz for PE since Whitehouse released
Erector way back in the 1980's. This trilogy of records concluded with the 4-track LP,
Offal.
Offal is quite different from its two sister albums, the biggest difference being that the album is comprised of longer tracks, but a shorter amount of them. We are introduced to the first track
Cleave, a bombastic opening track with distorted synths, static-filled church organs, and yelling of the highest caliber.
Cleave plays itself based on atmosphere mostly, with the track's looped noise drenched in continuous eerie noises from random distorted screeches to sudden tonal shifts in the organ, which sets an endless feeling of dread and horror.
Howl is a more modern piece, utilizing a combination of synths, digital percussion pieces, and heavy mic feedback. Most of the instruments bleed into each other, creating a universal sound birthed only from the mouths of insanity, as continuous ranting from our vocalist is heard over the backdrop of this chaos.
Slice goes on a much more bombastic path than the tracks before it; mixing pulsating synth beats with pauses in between over certain intervals. These pauses don't seem to have a continuous rhythm and are more or less done at the random behest of our collective madmen. The interesting thing about this track is its pauses, most PE tracks don't give your ears any time to breathe, and continuously bombard you with noise, never letting up until the very end of the track itself.
Slice in this regard, is surprisingly merciful for a PE track and as such really takes away from the atmosphere SJ spent two tracks building up. The final track,
Crawl creates a simple DJ rip beat as the distorted sound of a lawnmower is played in the background. Eventually, we hear small noises of what appears to be an engine being started, to no avail, in a heavily distorted fashion. Being the longest track on the record,
Crawl wastes no time going out with a bang, as our lovely Kevin Tomkins begins ranting, slowly escalating his voice until he begins screaming in an almost painful sounding fashion.
The interesting thing about
Offal is in how surprisingly tame the lyrics are. Sure they still have their moments of depravity and vice, but, when compared to past SJ albums, the lyrics are much more tame and simplistic. One can almost feel a religious aura emanating from the album itself.
Crawl gives heavy credence to these claims, as Kevin switches from ranting to humming his words in an almost euphoric tone. In all of the tracks, his words are spoken with an attitude of messianic anger, as if he were a preacher on the pulpit; angrily screaming his anger and frustration with God and the world in front of his surprised congregation. A priest, falling from grace, into a pool of insanity and rage, collected into a single form. It is almost like thousands of angry souls and emotions, fused into one collective consciousness, but the collective cannot think properly without contradicting itself, so it simply screams with no end in sight.
