Veteran industrial music provocateurs Boy Dirt Car moved from their native Milwaukee to Minneapolis more than a decade ago. Their cacophony continued unabated, yielding two recent statements of unsettling power. Grava, inspired in part by the upheavals of 1968, is as riotous as that year; bandleader Darren Brown and cohorts derive from all that unrest occasional snatches of mantric melody amid their ambient brutality. Those occasional melodic rudiments are interspersed among electronic gurgles, acoustic abrasions and sinisterly buried vocals rife with conspiracy and apocalypse.
Neptune is a Power Station reframes most of Grava’s elements in a more compact dose, with the addition of bleating free-jazz trumpet and bells that wouldn’t be out of place in a high-church liturgy. It was composed as the soundtrack to director Christopher Powers’ 19-minute movie capturing the group in their foreboding, ritualistic concert glory.
