‘THE KICKING MULE’ Album Review

Street Sects is a fairly unusual entity in the modern underground music scene. Their core aesthetic is distinctly industrial, a throwback of sorts to the mid-to-late ‘90s and groups like PIG or Orgy, but there’s a unique melange of other influences, some of which have taken prominence on their second album, The Kicking Mule, coming out October 26th via The Flenser.

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On previous releases, Street Sects has opted for a sound perfectly in sync with their nihilistic, despairing lyrics. Synthetic percussion hammering away, waves of distortion, raw screaming. Songs like “In Contempt” or “Victims of Nostalgia” battered at the listener. Early on, Street Sects was as brutal as a hardcore band, managing a level of animosity few industrial groups could evoke with electronic instruments alone. But Street Sects has evolved very quickly since their debut album End Position came out in 2016, slowly letting their melodic side emerge and take over.

The Kicking Mule’s biggest departure from End Position is singer Leo Ashline’s morose, dark vocals that evoke post-punk icons like Bowie, Jaz Coleman, and Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy. Leo’s screaming, once pervasive, is kept to brief, cathartic bursts and utilized to lend a ravaged, desperate sense to the songs. Similarly, the music is more balanced between eerie synths, guitar melodies and blasts of noise. Still, the group’s percussion hasn’t changed much from its martial, robotic pounding, other than to present more space in each song for other elements to breathe.

In many ways, this evolution for Street Sects makes perfect sense. For all the intensity they once put forth, it was Leo and instrumentalist Shaun Ringsmuth’s knack for a hook that made their incongruous formula work. By bringing a refined, expanded palette to bear, the ten tracks on this album feel infinitely more dense than their relatively short runtimes: the album is barely 30 minutes. And, in many ways, by keeping their rage pent up, it is that much more rattling when the group unleashes their full heaviness.

It’s a shame, though, that they haven’t found a way to add more color to their percussion. As short as this album is, by the 25 minute mark, the monotonous tone of its ubiquitous synth kick drum gets grating. It’s not that there’s not other percussion flitting in and out of these songs, it’s just that, unlike its analog equivalent, this drum sound is so robotically identical throughout that you’ll eventually wish they’d use any other kick drum sample.

On the other hand, Street Sects is a live band and the realities of being an electronic act performing live is that, in order to improvise, percussion has to be easy to program on the fly and having a wide variety of percussive samples to deal with makes that a very tricky proposition. While it might result in a slightly less compelling experience on record, it’s a totally acceptable tradeoff of being a performing artist and, thus, one who can continue to make good albums like The Kicking Mule. And maybe, eventually, they’ll be able to add a third musician to their live show who can enable them to spice up their percussion sounds.

Taking this singular, notable flaw into account, The Kicking Mule as a whole is remarkable, not just for being a truly unusual-sounding album, but for being continually surprising and well crafted as well. Just one listen of The Kicking Mule is not nearly enough to appreciate how much detail and nuance is lurking beneath the sullen, intense sounds that define Street Sects.