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Album reviews Music

Nailbiter

Toronto’s Josh Korody is best known for playing in shoegazer guitar bands (Beliefs, WISH) and as a producer/engineer for a variety of punk bands (Fucked Up, Dilly Dally, Greys). But his new project, Nailbiter, isn’t focused on the guitar. Instead, he’s working with analog electronics and modular synthesis to make creepy industrial techno and noisy ambient music. The only human sounds are the faint hints of heavily processed vocals that occasionally echo beneath a harsh wall of pulsating, dystopian soundscapes. 

He uses so much distortion that the synths tend to play the same sonic role that guitars do in his other work. You can hear the influence of bands like Suicide and Jesus and Mary Chain in some places, but where the music diverges more significantly from the indie rock tradition is in its lack of anything resembling traditional song structure. The tracks seem less like compositions than snapshots of ideas and experiments, which is where the album finds the most common ground with techno. 

Top track: Scrambling

Nailbiter plays Bambi’s Thursday (October 22) and Devil’s Night at Geary Lane October 30.

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