World Eater
Benjamin Power’s third album as Blanck Mass is club music for an uninhabitable planet. Like Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin (or Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, for that matter), Power’s best moments twist pop shapes into dark new forms, alloying industrial music with R&B (“Please”), and Caribbean rhythms with Arctic atmospheres (“Silent Treatment”), creating a hybrid that hits like 100 pounds of fog.
As humans, we are aware of our inner beast and should therefore be able to control it. We understand our hard-wired primal urges and why they exist in an evolutional sense. We understand the relationship between mind and body. Highly evolved and intelligent, we should be able to recognize these genetic hangovers and control them as a means to act positively and move forward as a compassionate species. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Recent global events have proven this. The human race is consuming itself. World Eater, the new album by Benjamin John Power’s Blanck Mass project, is a reaction to this. There is an underlying violence and anger throughout the record, even though some of these tracks are the closest Power has ever come to writing, in his words, “actual love songs.” “Maybe subconsciously this was some kind of countermeasure to restore some personal balance,” Power explains. On World Eater, Power further perfects the propulsive, engrossing electronic music he has created throughout his impressive decade-plus career, both under the Blanck Mass moniker and as one-half of Fuck Buttons, as he elaborates upon the sound of 2015’s brilliant double album Dumb Flesh. As massive as the sonic world of the new record often feels, its greatest achievement is in its maximization of a limited set of tools, a restriction intentionally set by Power himself. “As an exercise in better understanding myself musically, I found myself using an increasingly restricted palette during the World Eater creative process. Evoking these intense emotions using minimal components really put me outside of my comfort zone and was unlike the process I am used to. Feeling exposed shone a new light on this particular snapshot. I feel enriched for doing so.”
Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power shows his teeth on his new LP as Blanck Mass. *World Eater *is suitable for casual noise fans who have some curiosity for extreme music and a decent threshold for pain.
Stephin Merritt loves a good gimmick, doesn’t he? There was his Magnetic Fields magnum opus, 1999’s 69 Love Songs—exactly what it sounds like—and his subsequent experiments with form and instrumentation: i, Distortion, and Realism. While those latter gimmicks purposely limited Merritt, perhaps as a means to rein in…
A brutal, bruising but ultimately exhilarating third album from one half of Fuck Buttons.
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Also: Nadia Reid – Preservation, Chicano Batman – Freedom Is Free, Blanck Mass – World Eater, and Temples – Volcano
Just in case there were any doubts that electronic music can have as much of a political voice as other genres, Blanck Mass silences them with World Eater.
World Eater is ferocious and intense, but it's also thrilling and bristling with life – and it’s these contrasts that make it such a blast to listen to.
Despite having built a compelling career in experimental electronic duo Fuck Buttons, Benjamin John Power has spent most of his work under h...
Benjamin John Powers, one half of noise-duo Fuck Buttons, returns with his spectacular, positive third album as Blanck Mass.
'World Eater' by Blanck Mass, album review by Josh Gabert-Doyon. The full-length comes out on March 3 via Sacred Bones. Blanck Mass, play 2/31 in The Hague.
World Eater reflects a landscape filled with violence, anger and darkness.