Metal Machine Music

With all this blah de blah about "release schedules", "promotional budgets" and "priority acts", so many albums fall down the back of the major label sofa and don't get reviewed or listened to by anybody, anywhere. Accepting the fact that most of them are dross and should never have seen the strip light of a record shop in the first place, there are still one or two that are mighty impressive in their own idiosyncratic way. A random flick through the last few years throws up excellent, but largely ignored, albums by Gavin Bryers, Screaming Trees, Mojave 3 and June Tabor. The current album by Pitchshifter, not so cunningly called www.pitchshifter.com, is a prime contender to join the pretty darn illustrious list above, although you should be duly warned that it's not for the musically faint-hearted, as it comes across (and you can quote me on this) as a mix between Black Sabbath and Roni Size. Yes, indeed.

When you're writing about anything resembling metal, you always have to preface your remarks by saying this type of metal has nothing to do with the moribund likes of Motley Crue or Poison - such has the genre been sullied down the years by poodle-haired Frankensteins of the fret-board. Basically, once you stay on the Metallica and Slayer (and bands of their ilk) side of metal you're OK, which is why newer bands like Coal Chamber and Machine Head are to be congratulated for exorcising the ghosts of the Spinal Tapers who roamed the land in the last decade.

Pitchshifter emerged from Nottingham as part of the "extreme noise" movement back in the early 1990s. Very much peripheral figures in those days, they released stuff on a variety of small indie labels which was mildly impressive in a sledgehammer guitar sort of way. The 1993 EP, Pitchshifter vs. Biohazard Therapy? Gunshot (The Remix Wars) helped their cause no end, and the Infotainment album saw them touring alongside acts like Fugazie, Helmet, Napalm Death and The Melvins (the latter being Kurt Cobain's second favourite band).

A little bit of contrived publicity helped their situation when they played The Phoenix Festival in 1995: a massive crop circle in the shape of an eye (Pitchshifter's logo) appeared in a field half a mile from the festival stage and generated loads of "spooky aliens" stories in the metal press for them. Now signed to the Geffen label, this new album is a bit of a head-trip for their traditional fans, as the band's front man J.S. Clayden explains: "We realised we all like two things - break-beats and punk. We've always had a punk mentality and drum'n'bass is the punk of the 1990s, o it just seemed natural to make this sound the backbone of the album".

Helping them along on their journey from metal to metal/dance was The Prodigy's studio guitarist Jim Davies (the man who played on Firestarter) and there's also some acoustic guitar courtesy of Bivouac's Paul Yeadon. With all the break-beats cohabiting with the crunching guitars, the overall effect is a sort of updated industrial sound - the sort of music that Nine Inch Nails would be making if they were any good. Clayden set out to make "the sickest, most ultimate guitar/dance music crossover record imaginable" and says he achieved this by "sampling, flipping, reversing, delaying, distorting and generally bastardising the songs into new hybrids of the originals. I think we managed to keep the live crunch in there, and once the live guitars and drums hit the hard drive there was no stopping us from making this sonic boom of a record".

There's also a nice bit of caring and sharing at the end of the album's last track, which consists of 50 samples from the disc - and they're there for anybody to use. "That's so all the pirates out there who are going to sample us anyway can have an easier job of it," says Clayden. "Besides, we've stolen so many samples in the past, we figured it was time to give something back."

www.pitchshifter.com is available on the Geffen label. Pitchshifter play The Mean Fiddler, Dublin next Tuesday night.