- Downliners Sekt have a history of hiding in the invisible nooks between niches, with a decently-sized discography that jumps from genre to genre to not-yet-invented genre. But it's their trilogy of EPs on Disboot—now reaching its conclusion with Meet the Decline—that have earned the mysterious group the attention they've so long deserved. Their last, We Make Hits, Not The Public, had them build harsh hybrids of exacting Alva Noto severity and the ghosts of UK garage out of twisted scrap metal, compressing the exotic dread of producers like Shackleton into massive techno wrecks at odd BPMs. It was their most accessible, beat-oriented release yet, with an emphasis on full-fledged vocal samples that bleated and begged in an eerily inhuman vacuum.
The group's increasingly out-there mixes as of late have prominently featured shoegaze and old archival blues recordings (among so much else), influences that float to the murky fore in tracks here like "All I Can Hear Now" or "Rising Saudade." Bursts of anxiously strummed guitar lash out through the darkness like violent flashes of lightning as mangled voices quiver and moan in between the deafening thunderclaps. "Hear" makes for an admirably challenging opener as its palpitating heartbeat skips and stutters, a horrifying inversion of garage's friendly swing-and-skip that never quite coalesces.
"Rising Saudade" and "Locked Faces" both move towards ideas more concrete, as the vocals form identifiable words and hummable melodies amid the growing din around them. "Saudade" —a Portuguese word for a specific type of heartbreaking nostalgic longing—is breathtaking as what sounds like phased piano chords and guitar rumbles lay the ground for a skittering, hyperspeed drum pattern that brings the track to a climax of hushed gasps and raucous cracks.
The furthest move inward, closer "Hockey Nights in Canada" forgoes the hardcore continuum almost altogether for an intriguing look of where the Sekt might be headed next, post rock minus the bombast. The EP's typical marshland crawl is tempered by slow-motion breaks rather than the usual stagger, and acoustic guitar strums burst into fiery, distorted chords that burn themselves out in a startling bit of overt, accessible romanticism. That's the other thing about Meet the Decline: even amidst the depression, their music remains almost indefinably beautiful, something just out of reach but definitively there, something that ties these loose and restless experiments together in one awestruck expression of dumbfounded existentialism. It's typical of the group to make their conclusion with what feels like the furthest they've ever flown from resolution, but what ending could be any more appropriate? We've emerged from the primordial pre-industrial tarpits with them, we've seen them make the hits, and now we've hit the rock bottom of the decline. Where next?
Tracklist01. All I Can Hear Now
02. Rising Saudade
03. Locked Faces
04. Hockey Nights in Canada