Deep North

The debut album by Oakland's Swann Danger sees the band add live drums into the mix. Stark, minimal, and uncompromising, Swann Danger make music as bleak as Siberia on a cold day, but, paradoxically, there's a heady attraction to their sound, a curious raw appeal that pulls the listener in. Building everything on implacably precise bass and drums (the original duo of vocalist/guitarist Cynthia Mansourian and bassist Andy Zevallos are now joined by Robert Perales on drums) the Swann Danger sound harks back to Metal Box-era PiL in its angular almost-dub sweeps and skitters, surges and flows. In a way, it's a very British sound - you can imagine Swann Danger cropping up on the John Peel show circa 1981, but in fact they're graduates of the Californian school of post-rock invention. Cynthia Mansourian sings with a fatalistic clamor, like Lydia Lunch gazing through windows at rain, while her guitar pokes the listener like needles. The songs frequently kick conventional structures aside in favor of unexpected tangents: 'The Divide' skids off into an almost militaristic workout, the drums hammering an uncompromising tattoo while the guitar scribbles over the top like crayon. But then the title track, urged along by a bass-pulse worthy of the great Jah Wobble himself, ushers us past the velvet rope and the frowning bouncers, into the death disco. Here, the band suddenly become bizarrely immediate and accessible, the bass holding things to a danceable throb even as the drums throw in punctuation and the guitar scratches at the song like fingernails on a locked door. Now that works. Swann Danger certainly aren't going to be everyone's idea of a good time, but I'm quite happy to point them at my head.