Aging quickly as the world crumbles in piles around them, the Swiss fellows that make up Coilguns have bounced off of their craggy, earthen mathcore-grunted beginnings towards sleepier eclectic noise-rocking post-hardcore. To even begin to consider this a ‘mellowing out’ you’d have to have rubbed up hard on their first album. If you fell in love with their anxious bulldozer of a full-length debut ‘Commuters’ expect something slightly more atmospheric; A sludge-tinged bout with post-hardcore rhythmic play characterizes the best parts of ‘Millennials’. Still a screaming mathcore band at heart, Coilguns survive by the grace of a great collective talent for creating differentiated sounds and moods throughout their second full-length.

The tension appropriate for a great noise rock album can come from an endless screaming fit, or better yet a giant rubber-banding bass performance, but Coilguns have generally built tension with scatterbrained, needled guitar work that erupts and fiddles out cruelly anxious rhythmic feats. I found myself less prone to simply focus on the guitar work this time around because ‘Millennials’ uses every available second to work in some amount of greater detail. They play with every aspect of their sound just enough to keep ‘Millennials’ slightly long listen from becoming a chore. Most notably the album’s dense and almost tribalistic rhythms begin to pull away from the constant Breach comparisons folks throw at this band and, for me, lean towards something more relevant to early Unsane or even late 80’s NoMeansNo. Their sound is appropriately rough and at times menacing.

Though that roughness comes from the torrid reality that Coilguns are portraying their lyrics read as rants of obscure frustrations, allusions, and even some small amount of inside humor. What I get from reading the literature is that the over-saturation and under-valuation of today’s musical landscape is both an inspiration and a minefield of frightening absurdity. They’ve taken control and ‘Millennials’ is a remarkable math/noise rock product for an almost entirely do-it-yourself production with songs largely written ‘on the spot’. It may not have left a huge impression on me personally, and I think that might come from the spontaneous nature of their writing, but I have to commend this record’s sound and style. Without question ‘Millennials’ is one of the stronger noise rock-related releases I’ve come across this year.

Network of seismic restrictions. 3.25/5.0

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