Ourobonic Plague - G.A.: Five: Continuum

 Released: April 30

Ourobonic Plague’s latest album comes as the sixth installment in a “G.A.” Series of albums beginning with “Zero: Crystallisation.“ The series is one of genre-spanning depth and “Continuum” focuses heavier on light synth textures and small sampled bits of sound coalescing around varied drums, most of which maintain a sort-of hip-hop focus. It’s a simple but very pleasant blend that allows a lot of breathing room for the drums and a weird variety of drone and ambient adjacent synths. It opens up with “Push,” which has the most obviously hip-hop informed rhythm that is toyed with and manipulated to great effect, raucously right around the two-minute mark where it gets tuned into swirling mush for all of about 10-15 seconds before smacking right back into a cohesive beat. 

Things swing into an almost electro-beat focus on “Surge,” which honestly gives off a hip-hop Frankenstein vibe - Frankenstein as in the vintage horror creature, not as a euphemism. It’s leery in the synths and tight but very basic in the rhythm. It’s a chill and weird track that almost overstays its welcome until eventually fading away in a filter was that sweeps up everything. Then we’re back to some erratic electro-beat oddities on “Execute,”which is probably the closest we get to a true industrial track here but it fits in great with the grungy industrial vibes that the whole album is giving off. 

The best part for me is that final track, however. “Seal” takes a very slow and steady approach to a hip-hop and dub blend of a track with a seasoning of grunge on top of all of it. It’s slow and raspy, with a lot of weird sound tinkering in the middle that feels like a glitched out solo of something. It kind of odd to consider something like a drone track to have a beat with it, but it works quite well especially as a mutated reverb and glitch takes opportunities to overwhelm everything else briefly. The whole album is pretty hazy and dark, with a certain menacing overtone that feels aggressive in spite of the generally slow pace of everything going on here.