Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 11/07/05
Label: Rock Action

A genealogical note to put Part Chimp's unswerving love of monstrous volume in perspective: vocalist and guitarist Tim Cedar and drummer Hamilton Industry were once in Ligament, a ruthlessly heavy trio who stalked the dark lands of London's "Camden scene" in the mid 1990s. Their belief was clear from the beginning: volume and heaviosity are proper aesthetic ends in themselves, since, if sound is cranked to a near intolerable level and extruded in a form so condensed it's almost solid, submission is inevitable. Metaphysical theory explicated via rock music? Hell, why not?

Of course, musicians from The Who through Swans to Big Black and My Bloody Valentine have long understood the primal power of rock dynamics delivered at extreme volume and clearly, whacking up the sound is not an issue for fans of Dido or Debussy. Still, some music simply demands to be cranked and - this is crucial - it needs to "sound" loud even if the volume setting only shows 6/10. Follow?

South London quartet Part Chimp make rock music as heavy and brutish as their knuckle-dragging name suggests. It evokes for the most part some Neolithic Thing which has blundered out of the undergrowth and now stands there, howling and hairy under a black moon, before it embarks on the long, evolutionary road which will lead eventually to Pro Tools, MIDI and DAT technology.

For all its thrillingly base power, however, sophomore LP "I Am Come" is by no means without skill or inventiveness. This monolithic, riff-heavy chug is easy to play badly and leaves little room to move, but Part Chimp are masters of the art and have finessed the form in their own way. Their debut, "Chart Pimp" (ho!), was a thunderous and sludgy calling card, but now, their lumbering grooves have a decidedly Krautrock momentum and there's a drone-rock linearity to their physical compulsiveness.

"War Machine" is particularly indicative of the shift, suggesting if not quite a cruise down an autobahn with Kraftwerk, then at least a drunken waltz with Mogwai in the Black Forest. "Bring Back The Sound" (a single from last year), meanwhile, features Sonic Youth-like noise explosions blasting away from its white-hot core, "Punishment Ride" joins the dots between Black Sabbath and Fugazi and the demented "Fasto"…well, let's just say there's a damn good reason it's not called "Slowo".

Part Chimp are here to challenge all that nonsense about loud and heavy being big, but not very clever. And, if Darwin was right, then "I Am Come" is no less than the soundtrack to our collective subconscious.

    by Sharon O'Connell