God Is War - "Yakuza" Vinyl EP

Mackenzie Chami’s God Is War hails the nastiest edge of contemporary American industrial noise. The ‘Yakuza EP’ is his typically full frontal attack on the senses for Teesside’s Industrial Coast, emerging as one of their first releases on vinyl, manufactured by Press On. The four tracks demonstrate his distorted prowess and the barely-tamed physicality of God is War music with a tortuous barrage of barbed electronics pulverised into meaty rhythm. There’s nowhere to hide on this one, delivering its blows slow and purposeful, never frantic, and like he means it, to leave us feeling bullied and gasping for air, but sadistically satisfied.

Dispatched alongside Glyn Maier’s morphed field recordings on the same label, God Is War’s turn helps epitomise the label’s schizoid tastes for belligerent noise gristle alongside its headier tastes, with a focus on coarser sensuality that has no truck with sentimentality. ‘I’ spits twisted metal and sparks in a fire pit of noise contortionism, next to what sounds like Skrillex dubstep soused in slurry on ‘II’. The third part dials up his roots in BM and rocking industrial noise with manacled grasp of glitching riffs and tumultuous bass redolent of $hit & $hine’s most acrid, before calving off into the EP’s mor gear-crunching, bone-splintering rhythms on part 4 with a seething ferocity that almost conveys the might of his live shows.