- It feels like forever since Benjamin John Power ignited Blanck Mass, this side project to his visceral dance, experimental, rock, roaring mainstay, Bristol’s Fuck Buttons. Both outfits really feel very Bristol: taking so many ideas, both electronic and those that snake back into the history of popular music and smashing them all together to weird, wonderful and occasionally terrifying effect. I think that’s part of the reason it feels like such a long time (really it’s only been five years): Power is relentless, he wants to try so much and keeping up with it is kind of bewildering.

I remember when Blanck Mass began, as a modest, self-titled release, an afterthought that, if I remember right, almost didn’t get released at all. It was stuff that couldn’t quite fit into an FB record, mostly because it was ambient. Not any ambient though - this was rolling noise that had an alarming volume of internal structure, squirming, mutating and groaning under the surface. I was very glad that it did manage to get out there and to this day it remains, for me, a touchstone amongst the very many ambient releases flooding the world.

Remember though Power’s relentlessness: there was no way, that Blanck Mass was going to remain the way it began (although I was thrilled to notice there are at least one or two moments here that echo those old sounds). Since at least as far back as 2015’s Dumb Flesh it’s been feeling a bit like there haven’t been enough Fuck Buttons releases for Power to get all his ideas out there and, to a degree, both his creative outlets have just become different nozzles for the same stream of electronic music spewing out of his head. That’s a pretty easy case to make for the beat heavy, proggy beats of his new record. It certainly doesn’t sound anything like the original Blanck Mass, except in its pure, giant volume. Well, it is called World Eater.

There are certainly moments that are fearsome enough to deserve that moniker. Just check out the unhinged screaming in the middle of Rhesus Negative, which could have been borrowed straight from Trent Reznor at his most furious. While the intensity is pretty much always enough to convince the listener that they’re witnessing some vision of the apocalypse, there are other, less terrifying things going on.

As it was on Dumb Flesh, Power again indulges his interest in chopped up vocal samples. You’ll find fragments of singing and shouting -and everything in between- looped up and spun through all of the tracks on World Eater. It makes it difficult to consume all of this record straight-faced. The looped yodelling at the beginning of Please was when I started snickering. There are no actual lyrics to let you know what World Eater is actually about, but if it is a tale of the end times, it’s an absurdist one, intentionally or not. The cheesy feel that’s imparted won’t clog your pores to quite the same level as, say, HudMo or Rustie; to me Power seems to be echoing the ecstatic (sometimes deranged) gestures of Dan Deacon, an artist who’s often had a quasi-religious quality for me.

I do actually miss the Blanck Mass of yesterday, but I embrace Power’s new, self-destructing world with a near equal passion. It’s brutal and (to me at least) hilarious. This is the kind of uncontrollable, bachanalian euphoria for which they dreamed up dance floors in the first place and I really can’t wait to hear it in that context. In the meantime I’ll just pound my way through another listen on the headphones, grinning my damn head off.

- Chris Cobcroft.