Texture Freq

Reviews

Texture Freq What May Come EP

TEXTURE FREQ is a maniacal hardcore punk band from Minneapolis that reminds me a lot of 9 SHOCKS TERROR, but with a better balance through the equalizer. What May Come is a four-song EP, and the second available from TEXTURE FREQ. The opener “Golden Pavilion” is about a minute long and shifts from hardcore blast to Ginn-influenced guitar riff before you’re even comfortable, followed by the nearly epic (almost three minutes) “I Fucked the U.N. (and Lost),” which is a spastic, nearly stream-of-conciousness hardcore assault. “So What? It’s the Future” espouses a sort of positive outlook while exploring the relationship of destruction to creation. The closer “Head Machine” is hardcore at its finest, with an in-your-face attitude and a swaggering breakdown that decays and returns to aggro hardcore. If you dig raw, fast, abrasive hardcore that pulls no punches and doesn’t need any sort of posturing, then you’d better check out TEXTURE FREQ.

Texture Freq Masochistic Episode cassette

Six songs of demented, mid-tempo, plodding, disturbing queer punk. This is outstanding. It’s like Minneapolis, MN’s answer to Cleveland’s mighty CRUELSTER. The way the singer barks the repetitive and seemingly idiotic phrasing over and over, you could have even potentially convinced me that this cassette was CRUELSTER taking a slightly different direction than their previous output. Don’t be fooled tho, there are some very obvious and important differences between these two bands, one being that TEXTURE FREQ’s debut cassette comes with a zine entitled The Immediate Stages of the Hardcore Singer, whereas I’m not entirely convinced that the members of CRUELSTER know how to read, let alone write. The zine, written by the band’s singer Jimmy Cooper, has all the lyrics to the demo at the end, but first takes the reader on a bit of a journey which, as an idiot, was a little bit difficult for me to follow. Talks of opera singers, Kierkegaard, and Medusa are peppered through the discussions about queer struggles, formation of a band, lyrical writing, and even a reference to other published reading material to check out. Some of this may be over my head, but I absolutely love it regardless. I would be happy to pass the zine portion along to a credible zine reviewer if someone would be interested in doing a better job of reviewing written words. As for the music, don’t snooze on this. TEXTURE FREQ is top-notch.