Mauser - Isolation EP

Last year, Florida's Mauser released one of the best punk debut EPs of the year: End of the Line, a scathing crust-noise attack that punished rebellious souls across the world bigtime. After touring Japan, they’re back with another 7” called Isolation. Maybe I got a bit too excited about it beforehand, I was expecting that D-beat driven noise assault, but my first reaction was confusion as I waited for the music to develop. I listened to it once and thought, ‘Well that was pretty cool, very noisy hardcore, but I need another listen or two to plumb its depths.’ The second time I listened to it, I started checking my speakers and making sure the adjustments were correct, but by the end I’d realized Mauser had completely reformatted their sound. First of all, where the hell did the drums go? One of the defining and totally murderous elements of the previous EP was the belted out superspeed D-beats which were so prominent in mix. On Isolation, all I can hear is a frenzied clattering on the snare and tom toms, and a rumbling buried far deep where the kick should be. Is this D-beat at all? Impossible to tell when you can’t hear the beat, but most of the riffs seem to be hardcore. The noise is still layered over it all, but it comes at us like a swarm of insects now, as opposed to the piercing needles of static that frequently punctured the guitar tones on the debut. It is all in all a much more difficult and less enjoyable album to grasp than End of the Line, hard to tell if it is intentionally meant to be this chaotic and dissimilar or if it’s just sloppiness and fervor for output after initial success.

Having now bitched, I’ll say that Isolation is still pretty damn good for what it is: Angry, noisy, destructive hardcore. There are some killer riffs on here, but surely Mauser is capable of creating something with more clarity and depth than what we see here. But really, bring back the beats, Mauser. Don’t sink into the mass of pretentious noisers farting around out there in the ether.

In short: Viewed in its own light this is not bad, but it’s a bit of an unexpected disappointment after last year’s audio ransacking.

Standout tracks: Deterioration, Madness

Score: 6.0