Reviews

Agit8, where have you been all my perverted noiselife? I Crusader, No Retreat has "Noise Classic" written all over it. The glory of a thoroughly sadistic god condensed into an enraptured fury of dramatically arranged brainspasmic whitewash. Dizzying, ultraharsh screechbath, stupendously stupefying, ridiculously short, absurdly limited to twenty(?!) copies. Yup, you can just about kiss those earholes goodbye. When this bitch lets fly, the razored glittersheen RIPS your fucking head off, SHREDS through the various viscera, and SHITS all over whatever`s left. Oddly enough, this is not a particularly "angry" or "vicious" assault, but rather a deadly, clinical harshness focused on outright earhole annihilation. Painstaking effort went into this severely tweaked dreamland of gorgeous, screech-plastered ear fuckery. Layers peeled back in sexually charged suck-slather, then poured back in delicious waves of relentless raging ecstasy. A turmoil of pointedly precise riproar speaks for itself, the sound barrier scorched into whitehot oblivion. Side A`s "Hail" is particularly effective to this end, razor sharp crystal granules flashing through compressed, blistering ice-sheets and lightning shrieks of crisp, gleaming crack-shimmer avalanche. At times, bits of looped metal ka-chunk plunk about the periphery, more often than not thrashed to non-fidelity by voracious blasts of steel-slicked ferocity. Things settle down a bit as pristine, piercing, feedback tones slide against bulging, groaning leisure-jack loop-hum - only to get ripped raw by multi-tracked rustscrape shriek- crackle.
If I`ve got the title right, "Tapes Of Templar" offers a more spacious, if no less earhole piercing, antidote to Side A. Some of the same loops are present in the background, clinking and clumping, ineffectually fighting hacking fits of feedback-drenched scorch-wheeze. And again reminiscent of Side A, some degree of respite is allotted whilst extended synth psychedelia glides through the seething grind-slather. Unlike Side A, the jerky harshblast disruptions are comparatively plain: high-end, inelaborate screaming flatlines pissed into hissy fit slither. A final psychedelic interlude prove that Agit8 aren`t without some compassion, earholes still reverberating off flashes of follicular fallout.
As if all this weren`t enough, I Crusader, No Retreat comes with a business card cd-rom that serves as an excellent complement to the sound materials. Choppy visions of mechanical decay resolve themselves into what look like heavily treated stills from a live performance. The images come with their own soundtrack, too, possibly recorded live: darkly dramatic, near pe-ish in its deliberately arranged structure, clambering metals frantically scaling perforated sandblast textures. A fucking incredible piece of work.
NoiseGrade: A+
Harshness 9.8
Density 7.6
Rawness 4.2
Craftsmanship 9.2
Spasticity 8.3
Harmonicaness 5.5
Taken from Mr Blumpy