No.33 – Pitchshifter – www.pitchshifter.com

Ah, the halcyon days of 1998, when having your own website was something to be excited about and naming your album after said site seemed like a good idea.

WWW was released in March ‘98. I’d finished Uni the Summer before and was still working in my uncle’s factory, making gutters and hoping that I was going to get a proper job. (God help us all for that wish). Every now and then, I’d get the bus down to Dublin and meet up with my friends who were still in uni and hit the record shops. One of the places I’d make a pilgrimage to was The Sound Cellar, a pokey basement shop beside Trinity College that specialised in metal. The only place in Dublin that did and this time I had one record on my mind.

I still remember standing outside the main gates of Trinity, listening to this album on a borrowed discman, waiting for my friend to show up and having my mind warped by the heavy panning on the track Please Sir. It was love at first listen. 

I’d owned a few Pitch Shifter (They removed the space on this album) albums before but this sounded fresh and unlike anything I’d heard before. While most dance influenced industrial takes its lead from techno or trance, Pitchshifter are all in on drum ‘n bass.

And boy, what a difference that makes.

From the first beats on the opening track Microwaved, you knew that this was something different. That DnB pulse of the bass along with the unusual, jerky guitar is still a little unsettling until the chorus kicks into its full mosh pit provoking explosion.

It’s something that the band manages to make work for the whole album, the fusion could have come across as a gimmick, but I can’t think of any other metal album with double bass samples mixed with power tools and filthy guitars. Songs like the raging Please Sir can sit side by side with the more dance oriented ZX81 and it never feels disjointed.   

WWW is the band’s major label debut that really didn’t blunt the band’s political fury and lefty polemics. I’m not sure I even cared about that at the time, back when selling out was still a thing. But the one thing that always upsets me about politically minded albums is that everything the band are raging against on an album from 1998 are issues we’re still struggling with. We may have progressed as a society, but when you listen to an album like this it becomes apparent that most of those changes were superficial at best.

I’m pretty sure this album is why, when in 2004, I came across 65daysofstatic, their mix of beats and post rock made perfect sense to me. I’m not sure 65 would thank me for the compassion but it feels like WWW is a true precursor to The Fall of Math. 

WWW is an album that I hadn’t listened to in years but as soon as I put it on I knew it had to go on this list. Sorry to Faith No More, who’s album Angel Dust got bumped at the last minute. It was pretty annoying to be honest. I was half way through the write up and realised that WWW really needed to be on the list and Angel Dust was the last album that it could knock out. 

https://lynkify.in/album/www-pitchshifter-com/k3KW9Vun