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A Frames - Black Forest
(2005, Sub Pop)
 There's that special subsector of krautrock that sounded as if it were made in a muddy cave by giant drunken robots. It's cold, dark, mechanical and always a half-step out of tune. With deadpan drone it offered images of apocolyptic doom. With Black Forest, Seattle's A Frames present a punked-up version of that same droning mechanical apocolypse.
If Fad Gadget, Wire and The Swell Maps had a baby, that baby would resemble A Frames. Steve Albini would probably be the godfather. The songs of Black Forest lurch along like the body of a relentless but failing machine. Abrasive bass drone is pounded along by heavy, precise drums. The guitar may very well be strung with rubber bands, and I mean this in a good way. It pops and snaps and always sounds just a bit flat of the note it's actually trying to hit. Suprisingly, much of Black Forest is oddly catchy. Using the afore mentioned components (I call them modular expantion units), A Frames can unleash a stripped down dark punk manifesto like "Experiment" and then produce a dischordant sing song like "Death Train".
In the bitter and menacing world of A Frames civilization is dead and all that remains are sloppy broken robots who try to tell their story in song. These robots understand notes and timing but they have no concept of tuning or inflection. The songs end up cold and creepy but the robots don't know that. So they contentedly play away with unnerving vigor.
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