What Meatshell have made is a vivid, sometimes scary fun-house you’re glad you walked through.
Earshift Music
Andrew Saragossi | Saxophones, Electronics, Composition; Helen Svoboda | Vocals, Electronics, Double Bass, Bass Guitar, Composition; featuring Roman MC | Spoken Word (Track 8) Dylan van der Schyff | Drums (Track 4)
Hollow bamboo striking bamboo — the kind of knock you’d hear from warrior dances on a Pacific island, earthy, ritualistic — a bass drone rising from underneath, snippets of distorted sax, and then her voice. Helen Svoboda has a warm, inviting folk timbre, but electronics crowd in fast, a heavy bass hum trying to swallow her whole. By the time “The Elevator” ends on a computerized warble, she’s been fed through the wringer — and what comes out the other side is prettier for the damage.
Formed in the Netherlands in 2018, the Australian duo built their collaboration around pushing bass and saxophone into territory neither instrument was meant to occupy. Svoboda can make a bass murmur like something intimate or rumble like an incoming thunderstorm. Andrew Saragossi’s saxophone finds the percussive bones inside a note. Their third album wades deeper into processed terrain — producer Pat Telfer augmenting and twisting until sincere melody brushes up against desperation, euphoric groove against screaming chaos.
“The Kind That Cuts Deep” is what it sounds like when someone spins an AM dial through static and interference, catching snatches of a song you almost recognize, pings and sparks flying off the edges. “Scrape It Off” locks into a galloping drive, Svoboda’s voice pasted over itself, laughter buried somewhere in the back, the whole thing chiming and insistent. Then “Bliss” opens into a vast interior — saxophone phrases that bounce and keep bouncing as if the walls are made of echo, voice and electronics in conversation across a huge imagined room.
The Elevator Child finds a genuinely good dance pocket, piano and sax jerking alongside it, before the music dissolves sideways without warning. “High Speed Jockey” tips into the operatic then unravels into something chaotic and briefly unhinged. “Pressure on Me,” featuring Roman MC’s dynamic spoken word, lets Svoboda’s voice run pure and unfiltered for a moment — innocent, almost shockingly sweet — before the circuitry closes back in. Contradiction is the album’s native language, but so is a sly, buried humor.
What Meatshell have made is a vivid, sometimes scary fun-house you’re glad you walked through.
