Freighter

Freighter

The Den

12 July 2019

“Yikes! This one’ gonna leave a mark!”—Herodotus, 424 BC

Freighter is unrepentant in its recurring violations of music theory: irritating, ugly, noisy, jarring, frenetic and obnoxiously nerdy in 2019 with its mosquito-attention-span jazzmathmetalnoise. There is an inside joke somewhere here, but it’s possible that the band might have forgotten what the joke was supposed to be. Some possibilities include: Make people mosh but do the music in such a way that people are unable to mosh in unison and instead everyone is moshing like fast-motion body contortionists attempting to keep up with a sick-minded band that wants people to pull a hamstring and laugh all the way to the clinic. Another possibility is: This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The Freighter broadcasters of your area in convoluted cooperation with Extraterrestrial authorities have developed this system to keep you confused in case of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, the Freighter attention signal you just heard would have been followed by official announcements to forget everything you have just heard. This concludes this test of the Freighter Emergency Broadcast System.

Just in case it’s not clear, there is something so wacky about Freighter that it is recommended that the audience be open to a most frenetically fast-paced delivery but also a short-attention-span type of listening experience that seems to change rhythms and beats and directions in ways that are meant to be uncomfortable. The twisted fun of it all is for the audience to do the mental work, if you are willing to travel down this rabbit tunnel, and find the joy in the challenging racket. It is technical-humorous feverish delirium. Repeated listens show a lot of fun and skill, once the ears begin to hear the music in the chaos created by these three California/Wisconsin wackies. Usually, bands this technical, frenzied and skilled do not last a long time because the musicians do not have the will, energy and physical abilities to play decades at this warp speed. If those bands do last a long time, they end up slowing down, dialing down the intensity, usually changing to other slower genres. Catch the frenzy—this agitation and turmoil!—now before they get too old and decide that they want to “explore slower tempos,” because by that time it is too late.

freighter.bandcamp.com/album/the-den