Even for Kim Gordon, who has made a career from minimalist cool, The Switch – her second record with Bill Nace as Body/Head – is strikingly stripped back. The duo’s 2013 album Coming Apart pitched her iconic vocal desolation against her and Nace’s improvised guitar, the tumultuous effect cracked and operatic. They’ve ripped that overt drama – the instruments’ rich tone and her declamatory expression – out of this five-track collection, which broods around staticky textures that ooze like a weather report from a nuclear winter (a grim glimpse into life in 2021, then).
Some of it falls into predictable drone tropes: the end of Change My Brain has the grand throb of Mogwai or Tim Hecker at their most icily gothic. And there are moments of antagonism that don’t work away from the genuine sense of confrontation of their live performances, like the intensely shrill, bagpipe-like note that pierces the end of Last Time. But fans of this kind of thing will recognise Gordon and Nace’s masterful grasp of texture: In the Dark Room is densely layered but immaculately precise, like a cross section of toxic ozone. One sounds like a rotting carcass being dragged over gravel; another features a corrosive loop that races and collapses.
They’re great at sickly, suspenseful horror. Gordon sings less but moans on You Don’t Need as if the life were being sucked out of her body; when it dims, the pair trade microscopic scrapes of feedback that evoke the precision of sculpture. If you fancy a particularly on-the-nose soundtrack to society’s current state of collapse, this is it.
