Discs
critic pick
When you consider that most jazzy-metal spazzcore outfits tend to rely on bursts of violence and chaos rooted in precision and infinitely concrete structure, a band as talented and adept as Montreal's TDOAFS approaches from a completely improvised direction.
Recorded during a four-hour live session, this is a distinctively more sprawling offering than the band's past work. Broken up into nine parts, the free-form songs deviate from past explosive stop-start assaults and occasionally build up from sparse noise and discombobulating rhythms into panicky crescendos. Very little drags on unnecessarily, as is often the case with the self-serving and, well, masturbatory motivations behind improvisation. The end result is both a fine experiment as well as a neat compendium from an already versatile group.