If there was any lingering hope for a country still reeling from the Reagan administrations enfeebling of any successive generations beyond, that optimism was callously hit-and-run when music education was finally fully shorn from public education (with the shit-eating grin) of our early 90’s United States. Today what children birthed into the dark beyond are inherently stupid cow through no fault of their own when faced with ‘modern’ ideas like changing meter or fractal composition. What high art exists in music comes most often by accident, or through code-talkers able to find and translate PDFs of old ‘books’ describing what wild ideas you mightn’t find on YouTube. Damned and overwhelmed by chaotic music at increasingly high rates, many children born to the new auld cult of 4/4 view the daunting extremity shared between the history of noise rock and ‘math’ music as ancient relic. They eventually turn to experimental metal’s trendy and dilute impressions of the old ways, much like teenagers wandering through a modern art museum and chuckling h’yuck at cubism. Metal fandom’s generally cheeky fixation with the experimental collapse of post-hardcore into technical hard rock music comes in slow, unimportant waves of discovery. Don’t worry, though, I had music lessons in a well-funded late 80’s kindergarten and I own multiple The Jesus Lizard albums, I’m here for you.

The warp (structure) of this Minneapolis, Minnesota project is a heterogeneous mixture of tensile post-hardcore fluidity and mathcore unpredictability made fabric by the weft (thread) of noise rock’s performative anxiety. Unrelenting in its 90’s mania and unnerving in its post-millennial scrupulous attention to detail, Warp and Weft‘s ‘Patience’ is a tightly wound progression unraveling in real time across six tracks of furious catharsis and lingering woe. Two fairly equal parts inform this set of songs as the fucked up and scattered brains of Steve Austin (Today is the Day) and Dave Sardy (Barkmarket) surely influenced the open extremity and instrumentation nearly as much as the early schools of Coalesce and Converge. That isn’t to say that this ‘Patience’ sounds like any of those bands, but each half informs Warp and Weft‘s tightly-wound expression.

The trio come together from distant worlds with members of atmospheric blackened doom project Welter in Thy Blood and incurable ‘shitrock‘ troupe Morality Crisis with a sound that lands somewhere in between Ken Mode‘s ‘Entrench’ and Kiss It Goodbye‘s ‘She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not’. The Unsane loving noise rock fan will find the shouted vocal, cranked bass tone, and post-hardcore flow of the album easy to dive into while the fiddly, mathy Deadguy-core side of things is represented through the hard-ranting nature of the guitar/drum interplay. No doubt ‘Patience’ is a freak but, a highly listenable  one all the same. The modern noise rock fan who wants minimum skronk in their shouty, challenging rhythmic insanity should be able to warm up to this and I’d count myself in thanks to the overall progression of the full listen.

Angular as it is succinct, ‘Patience’ plays like a late 90’s hardcore 12″ as the band gets in and out in less than three minutes on each track until the two final songs slow down and chill out a bit. The highlights of each piece leading up to the slugged-out “Colostrum” center around bounding hyperspeed time changes, which will justify the mathcore references mentioned earlier. If the record didn’t include “Colostrum” and the reprise of “Fatal Altruism” at the end it wouldn’t work for me as a full listen. The psychedelic buzz of grime-smeared metallic noise rock/post-hardcore within those two tracks slows the mental grind and creates a dynamic release, a sourly barked defeat at the end of a volatile rant that I found valuable. Ultimately the fucked up balance that Warp and Weft strike on this debut EP appears as sound concept and professional execution that is uncanny for a band that formed less than a year before the recording. Highly recommended. For preview I’d suggest “Parallel Voyeurs” and “Fatal Altruism” to see both sides of what Warp and Weft bring on ‘Patience’.

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