by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
There’s something almost unnerving about how tight Landowner’s music can be, an unspoken sort of terror that things are going to explode without warning. They do not however, and perhaps that makes it all the more tense. The Holyoke, MA based quintet wrap their post-punk with industrial like precision, a mechanical sounding perfection where rapid guitars are often cleanly ping-ponging against repetitive rhythms. Everyone plays their part to sound less than human, a call back to Landowner’s origins as a solo project with laptops and drum machines. They’ve been busy recreating digitized punk minimalism into a living and breathing beast, almost violently tight, with an animated rigidity. The band’s fourth album, Escape The Compound, due out July 21st via Born Yesterday Records (Stuck, Neckbolt, Glow In The Dark Flowers), takes a look at how cult like presences in society and government can alter our daily life with a sordid view of faux reality. As always, Landowner’s Dan Shaw takes a brilliant microscope to his lyrics, picking and pulling at issues both hyper-local and alarmingly global.
Following the boisterous “Witch Museum,” Landowner’s latest single “Beyond The Darkened Library” is perhaps one of the album’s more subdued moments. That unnerving energy that Landowner posses is in full force, bleeping and blooping in a way we’d swear was computer driven, yet all praise is due to Shaw, Josh Owsley (bass), Elliot Hughes (guitar), Jeff Gilmartin (guitar), and Josh Daniel (drums). With twin guitars that plink in time with the impenetrable motorik drum beat, everything is played wildly close to the chest, the band only “stretching out,” for brief moments of hypnotic relief. The sense of mystery and dread in the composition works to benefit Shaw’s lyrics, as he weaves a tale about dungeon corridors and secret passageways that lead toward endless conspiracy theories, the labyrinth deep enough to get lost in forever.