Chugging guitars and pounding drums are the prevailing sounds on this split EP from Blindsight Records, former Xmas Lights guitarist Umair Chaudhry’s experimental/ambient/slash metal label with an impressive catalogue under its belt. Caretaker have a decade-long post-rock/hardcore career under their belt, while Undersmile are a much newer concern, and it’s an interesting choice of billing to put the two together. The two bands have plenty in common sonically, whether because one has influenced the other or because they share common influences isn’t clear, but the one obvious distinction is that of pace: Caretaker rollock along noisily while Undersmile take things much, much, much more slowly.
What they do, Caretaker do well – chugging riffage from the distorted guitars and bass, driving clatter from the drums and a few rounds of the post-rock “fun with time signatures” game – but it feels a bit samey after a while, particularly once we get past the head-nodding blast of ‘Yeehah!’ into the more inexorable ‘The Inexorable March’. Mike Patton-esque operatic vocals emerge and it all takes a bit of a turn for the pompous, turning into an earnest mid-pace trudge with a hint of the sludge about it.
Undersmile’s side of the EP takes the sludgy aesthetic and runs with it – well, runs in the sense that molasses runs downhill, as there’s nothing athletic about the pace of these two tracks which, at well over double the length of Caretaker’s offerings, tickle 100bpm at their very fastest. Musically, it’s cut from the same canvas as Caretaker, though the canvas has been soaked and stretched so the angular peaks and troughs become doomy canyons and abyssal plains. Closing track ‘Anchor’ begins with glacial sludgy riffing on distorted guitars and fuzz bass, preceding the arrival of doomy black-mass pseudo-monastic chanting, all of which contrasts markedly with a middle section of major-key sludge of a much more dreamy, almost wafty nature, if sludge can be wafty. The contrast calls to mind the middle of ‘Paranoid Android’, and similarly it kicks back into the relentless monks-of-the-underworld refrain once the middle section is done, the whole thing feeling much more like an Inexorable
March (with coffee breaks for the troops) than the Caretaker track under that name. We close with two full minutes of squealing clanking guitar sounds, which seems entirely appropriate in context, though ends in a disappointingly nondescript manner.
To this reviewer’s ear, the less experienced locals have delivered the more interesting side than the seasoned veterans. To an extent it depends on whether your personal taste leans towards the quicker, artier side or the slower, doomier side, but somehow there’s a wry sense of fun in Undersmile that’s lacking in the more serious Caretaker.