Liebestod - Beta Male LP

Label: Chondritic Sound

Our Review:

Jesse Sanes presents Liebestod as his fully realized Power Electronics project, one that parallels his role as frontman for the nihilist hardcore outfit Hoax. A violent intensity and spilt blood carry over in both projects, even as the vehicles are radically different. It must be noted that Sanes has collaborated with Puce Mary as Fejhed and JH1.FS3, whose two recordings mine a controlled malevolence through synth noise and heavily processed voice. Such is also the strategy for Liebestod, through which Sanes hangs an electric dread upon the voltage controlled blurts, junkyard metal-bashing, and scalding flames of white noise. Leibestod's psychological / conceptual position on Beta Male seems outside the typical poetics of sexual control and/or extremist political chest-thumping, scribing instead an existential crisis with Sanes standing at odds with everything and everybody, including himself. It makes for a brilliant if disturbing album, one that mirrors a similar plight found in Maurizio Bianchi's first fruits in the '80s applied through a brooding regimentation akin to Anenzephalia. As such, this album gets our highest recommendation, settling next to Puce Mary's The Spiral as one of the best noise albums of 2016.