This is a four-track EP from Umair Chaudhry and Marco Ruggiero, who were once part of the much-missed moody neo-industrial noisemongers Xmas Lights, and who now make up the more reserved, but equally tense and taut Monday Morning Sun. Fault Finders, a side project – if that’s possible, when the side project has the same members as the main project – extrapolate a notional line that could be drawn between between those two outfits.
Where Monday Morning Sun stretch the more ambient, less clanging aspects of Xmas Lights into a pseudo-ambient, somewhat chilly affair, Fault Finders take things even further into a dark and lonely world of super-repetitive musical elements. There are no tracks here shorter than five and a half minutes, and that’s at least as long as is required to construct these tunes around a palette of sparse, strong basslines and super-simple drum patterns. Echoed vocals and effectively stripped-down guitar and keyboard lines build up layers of sound to create a sound that’s slow-motion in feel, and that can be a strange combination of refreshing and cloying.
‘Stay The Same’ and ‘I Don’t Blame You’ encapsulate this sound, with similarly-constructed elements, where everything seems an echo of what went before, basslines and vocal melodies holding it together. The latter tune introduces some subtle, electronica-style processed beats, floating the sound up into a mid-ranged, almost futuristic kind of place. ‘Expectations’ and ‘Tribes’ feature, respectively, Nick Hudson and Misfit Mod – neither names I’m familiar with. The former features delicate, repeated vocal samples in its latter half, recalling Seefeel’s Quique, and the latter brings in some serious-sounding fuzz bass at its bottom end, rounding out the sound.
Side project though this might be, it’s further evidence of some rich and experimental musical talents. Fault Finders is music for the head in the best possible way, rewarding close listening and carefully building an almost three-dimensional world of sound in which it’s difficult not to get lost.
Download Fault Finding (For Beginners) at the Blindsight Records website