The forthcoming album by Béret, the songwriting project of Seattle’s Ian Kurtis Crist, is out October 18 on Chicago’s Born Yesterday Records. Jesus White is a tough and intense post-punk record made almost entirely without drums, which gives it a dreamlike and surreal quality.
The minimalist approach creates a powerful starkness and immediacy, as in the last minute and a half of “Time Like Fluid,” where one chord is repeated with increasing layers of guitar overdubs and rising intensity until it abruptly turns into a high squall of feedback. It’s unrelenting and beautiful.
Crist is an audio engineer, and the record sounds appropriately fantastic, the guitars sometimes crystalline and distant, sometimes violent and slashing with icy halos of feedback, vocals up front and clear. It’s a consistent, sonic world, but one where no two songs feel identical.
