IF YOUR IDEA OF MUSICAL HEAVEN IS WILDLY EXPERIMENTAL, THEN NIRVANA AWAITS

David Peña, who has appeared as guitarist with the recently reviewed and interviewed on this website Built For The Future, has, as Data Noise Floor, released Kid Rainbow. The album is available on the record label he runs, Austin (Texas) Indie Records – look at https://austinindierecords.bandcamp.com/

This is a deeply experimental album, and I can only really describe it as an extreme avant-garde electronica record, and it requires work to appreciate and “get”. It will easily be the most “out there” album I review in 2023, and I have embedded several tracks to enable you to listen and judge on a concept which seems to deal with life’s journey from start to finish, and overcoming the drudgery which can arise.

It is an album which must be listened to as a whole. In truth, it would be impossible to separate tracks into some form of playlist. It has been recorded extremely cleverly, and Peña is a very consummate musician, but I think there is an absence of the warmth that I adore in my music collection.

So, let’s start with Dark, probably the most accessible track on the album. It has a relentless beat, but some nice guitar work amongst the synths, which envelope the listener. Quite funky in places but also in others typical of the relentless experimentation going on. The words when they talk about “running away into the light, into the trees they will set you free” could be taken, I think, as a metaphor of this free approach to songwriting, in essence an extended electronic jam with some more fundamental rock music simmering beneath, especially the guitar burst, and Peña is a very good exponent of that instrument.

The title track is a similar length and seems to be a dystopian nightmare of the birthing process and the somewhat negative emotions which follow a difficult time of it. The track is embedded below, and I think that veterans of the Dance Tent at Glastonbury will find much to enjoy here, with the swirling round, hypnotic notes and beat. But where is the rainbow?

Next, a track without words, the short Subway in which I picture fighting my way through underground stations in either London or New York with masses of people and relentless noise, probably about as nightmarish as it gets for yours truly.

Subhuman strikes me as a paeon to the modern corporate entities attitude to their people and customers, not nice, and entirely disrespectful, this is a track with a punk rock attitude to our modern world and is extremely dark.

Lyrically in this track, there is a reference to Peter Gabriel with “shock the monkey on your head”, and this is repeated on Seven Eight which talks of “Hans and Jayne play w.o. frontiers;  Suki and Adolf shed the most of tears; Looky, looky, looky; if looks could kill; Seven hours and one hour”, but there any material similarity ends. Yes, Gabriel started experimenting with synth sounds at the time of “Melt”, and his was a world in which heroes and villains/megalomaniacs mixed freely, but this is taking that concept to an altogether different extreme. Although, again, when you do hear a glimpse of guitar amongst the noise you wish there had been a wee bit more.

It is the job of a music reviewer to provide the reader with a picture of an album he has been sent to review, alongside an honest opinion. Those who have read my musings over the years will know that this is not the type of music that I would choose to buy independently of my role as a reviewer. It is not, if I am honest, music that I would choose to spin on a Saturday night with a few beers. However, the progressive music scene is a very eclectic family, a huge spectrum, and I know that there will be a willing audience for this album, those who eat, drink, and sleep Avant and the wildly experimental.