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Hate Colours - Know Nothing

 

Fed up with the climate change-fuelled, spirit of '76, soaring temperatures of the summer (& all the hyperbole attached to it)? Longing for the dark winter days & nights along with the scares you can throw into yourself when the thermometer plummets and you become less sociable? Know Nothing is the album for you.

Think Aphex Twin-like, breathy sounds coupled with drum machines, found sounds, field recordings and a lot of songs about anxiety/paranoia and you'll have a reasonable idea of the sound Hate Colours have (they're a quintet lead by J. Turgenev, late of The Douglas Firs).

Second Track, 'House II', brings to mind Downward Spiral era NIN too so there's a bit of '90s industrial in the mix too. It's quite an achievement to keep things both upbeat an sinister but across the eight tracks there's generally enough of a beat to offset the creepy stuff. Goblin & their ilk are likely an influence too.

Recorded over the period of a couple of years (2015-2017) a number of the songs were inspired by a trip to Orcas island in Washington state. An online image search for the place doesn't produce the Blair Witch type scenes you'd expect from the music but we should probably be thankful that seeing the scenery and the whales didn't lead to an interest in dream catchers and crap campfire tunes. 

Hate Colours are definitely doing their own thing so good luck to them. The elements mentioned above are all atmospherically combined throughout the album and it definitely bears listening to more than once (and certainly more than its constituent parts in isolation would have you expect). Penultimate track 'Dream Lake Road' even manages to feel comforting despite the Einsturzende Neubaten-esque clangs during its five minutes so expectations are confounded right to the end. There's also not a single mention of Jon Snow.

Know Nothing is available from bandcamp here.

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