Tim Olive - Smelt

Released: August 10

Following  from his recent split on Molt Fluid, Tim Olive returns with a solo effort coming to us courtesy of Bent Window Records. While not decidedly an overwhelming or overly intense experience, Olive manages to cram in a few rather extreme moments among a overall runtime of calmer yet still very dystopian feeling noises and sounds. On that note, dystopian is probably my favorite word to describe this album, even through there is nothing explicitly said towards this theme. The magnitude of the sounds here can seemingly vary so wildly, with moments to suddenly build into madness then fade away. But throughout the whole album, there is this almost simmering feeling, one the never lets you forget about the madness that lies ahead and behind. 

Smelt consists of five tracks labeled in numerical order, opposed to having formal names. The first track may throw you off a bit as it is one of the more cacophonous tracks on the album. However, the next track that follows is the one that shows us the aforementioned "simmering" side of the album. Low electrical hums persist throughout the track as occasional noises of scraped strings appear momentarily only the disappear again, all while the electrical feedback builds and morphs slowly. By the time we, get to the final track, that intensity we hear in the first track has returned. But then it disappears and ends our experience in that slow simmer of feedback and hum. Smelt essentially gives the impression that it is a soundtrack for a broken and dying industrial world.