The Ineffectuals
First Offering
self-released
Music writing is often viewed from the outside as being a labyrinthine network of prefixes (post, proto, lo-fi) and suffixes (wave, core) used to invent niche microgenres. While there’s a certain truth to that sort of perspective, a lot more can be often be discerned by taking things as a gestalt whole. Take the first LP from Chicago’s The Ineffectuals. If you approached First Offering from a purely anatomical perspective, trying to suss out each particular sound, genre, and influence which went into the band’s mix of post-punk, synthpunk, and EBM would take weeks, but its tongue in cheek funky noise gets across immediately without any such analysis.
Coming across our desks after some discussion of VALIS, the previous project of one half of The Ineffectuals Jeremiah Meese (tip of the hat, Jared!), First Offering is packed with squirming, anxious tracks which feel as though their programming and riffs are about to split apart at the seams and collapse into a morass of quavering vocals and drippy synths. But rather than this tension being the product of real panic or noise, it comes about through the droll and rambling attitude of the band. Check the titling of “Son Of C.H.U.D.” or “Ducktator”, the latter no doubt christened after the band realized that its farty bass line bore a resemblance to a certain memorable cartoon theme, but it’s just as easy to read it as a stoned revising of Kas Product’s “Never Come Back”.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t riffs or satisfying tracks here, though again, those are more the result of mood rather than steely dedication to an aesthetic. The thudding “Gimme A Hit”, with its densely processed, NIN by way of Odonis Odonis guitar doesn’t technically sound like anything that’s come before it, but if you’ve been tracking the traces of a woozy interest in noise rock in the preceding record it scans clearly. The go-go groove of “Good Time” says more about what I have to assume is a pretty healthy interest in old outlaw biker movies than any particular moment in the fractured history of synthpunk.
Whether you’re coming at First Offering from a trainspotter’s perspective or are just up for some new noise, you’ll likely be impressed by the versatility and range it shows off in half an hour, careening through its cache of sounds and influences with all the elan of an insurance salesman on a bender but with the inverse amount of charm. Attitude isn’t everything, but its enough to hold together The Ineffectuals’ riot of noise.
