52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #51

Earthtone9 – Off Kilter Enhancement

(Copro Records, 1999)

Buy the album here

When metal fans of my age think back to 1999, they are probably met with unwelcome thoughts of Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, and Korn. They might even have the mental strength to endure memories of bands like Dope and Static X who benefitted from the success of the world's most immature sub-genre, nu metal. While these mental and aural traumas may never fully heal (partly because I still listen to some of this stuff), it's important to remember that the final year of the 20^th century provided us with metal albums of which we can still be proud. Botch's We Are The Romans, the emergence of The Dillinger Escape Plan with Calculating Infinity, and Still Life by Opeth are among the moments that mean we shall not banish 1999 from our memories. It was a key time for my changing musical tastes: I had access to my Mum's Ford Mondeo 2.0 with its reliable cassette player, money saved from years of being a paper boy, free time in between leaving school and starting university, and the small reviews of lesser known bands in Kerrang! every week. One review in particular captured my imagination, and culminated in me buying Off Kilter Enhancement by Nottingham band Earthtone9.

Perusing the mostly indecipherable track titles and listening to the album for the first time, I found myself thinking, “this is the strangest thing I've ever heard”. And while Buckethead, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and others have since made that thought seem ludicrous, it was a transformative moment in the development of my attitudes to music and the arts. I had never felt like I was listening to an “underground” band before, and the heaviness and obscure nature of the lyrics pushed me towards bands like Neurosis, Today Is The Day, and The Dillinger Escape Plan. Its bass-heavy guitar sound, crashing drums, and lurching vocal barks and wails left an impression on me that I still feel today. It felt simultaneously animalistic and intellectual; bursting with ideas and always threatening to do something unexpected, Off Kilter Enhancement was the esoteric escape from nu metal's high school self loathing. While kids everywhere were copying Fred Durst's backwards red Yankees cap, vocalist Karl Middleton was screaming unintelligibly and wearing nothing but clingfilm pants on stage; simultaneously conjuring images of rubbish performance art and adult incontinence.

Opening track “grind and click” is a cacophonous flurry of hardcore energy broken only intermittently by Karl's nearly monastic, clean chorus line of “blows my mind every time”. The heaviness continues in sludgier form in the wonderfully titled, “zechariah rush (uru shalom har meggidon)”, where we get our first example of Earthtone9 just making stuff up. I remember an interview with the band where they claimed that all of the weird non-words and strange lyrics were just nonsense, and I am inclined to believe them, but the title track of sorts, “off kilter,” might suggest how the music is intended to be received:

receive
receive - the revelation beaten on a skin drum
using instruments of bone

sheens gone, so tune in
feel the drone

to writhe
to writhe - to a rhythm with the blank eyed primitives
suffer the fire ritual

Off Kilter Enhancement is memorable because of the unique sound created, rather than an overarching meaning to the arrangements or lyrics. The animalistic force of the music is what carries the listener through and dumps them at the other end feeling exhausted and badly beaten. Even a delicate song like “0...0...0...” gives way to the senseless violence of “i nagual eye” and its atonal thrashing, while “enertia 65800” contains that very dynamic within its melodic and atmospheric verses, uplifting chorus, and brutal, crashing comedowns. Earthtone9 are not concerned about you not getting the point of all the heavy weirdness, but would rather you treated the whole album like a metal gig, and just smash yourself off the walls.

The album closes out with “nameless (the 4^th and 10^th)”, a personal favourite, and “simon says”, in which the fury built up since “grind and click” crashed in to existence seems to spill out in undeniably heavy and cathartic fashion. The relative thoughtfulness of “nameless...” gives way to the all out speed and aggression of “simon says”, before the album fades out with the random groaning and hitting of instruments you would associate with the end of a set. In fact, Earthtone9 used to enjoy stepping off the stage one at a time, leaving drummer, and Marlon Dingle from Emmerdale lookalike, Simon Hutchby, pummelling his skins as if the fury of the last hour would burn on forever – this is what Off Kilter Enhancement is about. Do not try to make sense of a man in clingfilm pants, only know that it is and will always be.