Water Damage: 2 Songs

For those late to the party, Austin eight-piece Water Damage are the key architects of tension. Simply, this band wouldn’t be what they are without it (don’t let their press photo fool you).

Taking the visceral aspects of art, and through searing, combustible pressure, Water Damage deliver the kind of sonic disturbance inspired by the frayed and damage facets of this world. Life’s scars seemingly thrashed out and etched to tape in wonderfully obscure ways.

Riddled with friction and rumbling with discontent, it’s a band operating on the fault lines, and consisting of George Dishner on synthesiser, dual bass players, Nate Cross and Jeff Piwonka, bowed guitarist Travis Austin, multi-instrumentalist Mari Maurice, and a three-pronged attack of drummers, Thor Harris, Greg Piwonka and Mike Kanin, on 2 Songs Water Damage pick up where they left off from last year’s acid-mangled Repeater. Another meat-raw, debauched racket, 2 Songs sees Water Damage canvass both ends of the spectrum; or in their own words, the “Yin and Yang”.

Water Damage: Repeater

Twisting the noise of fellow agitators Oxbow and Swans into something more hypnotic, Water Damage continue their explorations into the noise-rock-inspired improvisation. Constantly locked in the groove of dread, with sweltering humid gusts 2 Songs is a fitting progression from a band that will always produce a different sounding record from the vaults at each time of asking.

As was the case with Repeater, “reels” are referenced in both tracks from 2 Songs, touching on the aspects of Water Damage’s protracted recording techniques whereby the full wheel is utilised. And with such an ominous sound, it’d be rude not to.

Akin to a buzz-saw echoing feverishly around a sweaty workshop, Fuck This: Reel 11 emerges from slow, hypnotic build ups, exploding with drones and squelches that cleans out the ears. It’s the subtle dissonance and tribal rhythms that interlock, transforming the composition into some freak-laden campfire séance through a mélange of psychadelics.

And speaking of psychadelia, Fuck This: Reel 13 is as close to that world as Water Damage have ever been. With a warped hush where the buzz-saw noise of …Reel 11 is drowned out by spatial keys and a chiming percussion that forms the bedrock of the track, Fuck This: Reel 13 opens yet another door through the miasma in which Water Damage manage to lead us through.

Godflesh: Purge

2 Songs is another important dispatch in a story that is emerging as one of the most intriguing to derive from the underground in recent years. From the stunning artwork (there hasn’t been anything that has bettered Water Damage’s last two albums), to their sound, the whole project is a juxtaposition only bands with no concern for rules can produce.

Think of a bunch of outliers spending their day on the workshop floor, only to down tools of a different kind. Yes, this is music inspired by the roar of machinery and the smell of grease-stained floors, and somehow Water Damage cross-pollinate the avant-garde with a street-level civic vitality that few of their peers have replicated. It makes Water Damage one of a kind, and 2 Songs is further confirmation of this.

2 Songs is out now via 12XU. Purchase from Bandcamp.