Geisha’s debut album Mondo Dell'orrore was an enjoyable exercise in noise rock and in 2006 was unlike most music that I’d heard. That album stayed on my playlist for a while and when I found out that the band had finally come up with a follow up I was more than a little excited.

Geisha focus on music that incorporates a lot of different extreme music styles without really touching on anything metal. There’s plenty of mid paced sludge and the kind of angular noise rock that fans of The Jesus Lizard will eat up but there’s also long quiet passages of droning clean guitars and an almost Earth like atmosphere to the quieter parts. To go with this, the band also has a tendency to completely bury the listener in mountains of explosive electronic noise.

The album opens with the superb Prelude to Amber Pays the Rent which is basically a song that has every element of the band that I loved in the first place. Starting with completely dissonant and angular noise rock before exploding into proper power electronics and then settling down into an almost psychedelic drone while all the time being absolutely captivating. It’s a terrific start to the album and is followed up by a trio of short songs that show off the band’s love for angular and dissonant noise rock without really going into their drawn out psychedelic jam mode. That’s left for the last two songs on the album.

Sportsfister has a slow almost mellow start but with the kind of coiled tension that you just know is going to completely burst at some point or another and it doesn’t waste too much time getting there. The song has a kind of early Swans meets punk rock meets noise meets The Jesus Lizard vibe that is quite powerful. The vocals are often buried in the mix and if you don’t pay close attention might just come across as another aspect of the noise that the band makes. The real jewel in the crown though is the thirty minute epic Theme from Diana. I don’t really want to break it down for you but the thirty minutes plays out like a tightly scripted, tension filled thriller. The slow burning drone and layer upon layer of effects seems never ending but when the resolution finally happens it’s almost orgasmic in nature. The band does the whole building of tension and subsequent release like few other bands out there at the moment and Theme from Diana is testament to that fact.

This album is a perfect synthesis of sludge, noise, drone and all round superb songwriting.Overall, Die Verbrechen der Liebe is a fantastic album that fits very nicely next to last year’s Boris/ Merzbow collaboration but is at the same time infinitely better. 



Label - Crucial Blast
Year of Release - 2008