Similar to what
Shellac is up to, only weirder, with similar tight playing, chops, and endless surprises (like frequent mid-song tempo and feel changes), this Asian-American New York trio combine post-punk, industrial, and noise/art influences with minimal, concise, compact, hissed lyrics to comment on both the cold, nightmarish reality of man's inhumanity to man (in the same detached way an art film would) and the possibilities of disdaining standard rock riffs. When they shout in hyper-sneer, "Boredom will kill yourself/Use your f*cking gun," it sounds like they'd laugh at your corpse. Well-recorded in Brooklyn by
Martin Bisi,
Ultra Bide is great, grinding, ugly, scary, hairy, headache stuff, like being crushed by the hands of a mad, grinning giant. ~ Jack Rabid