Since the time I've heard the first Grain Belt CD, I was amazed by the sounds of this trio. This American band, consisting of Wince that is currently gaining more and more attention and popularity, Phage Tapes director Baculum and Willful from Small Doses. Their sound consists of everything that you need for brutal, without any sign of subtlety, filthy and rather disgusting harsh noise. Dragline is quite short 20 minutes tape, released via Skeleton Dust Recordings. No additional information is found about it. The cover is a nice collage of machines and constructions. On the inner side - colorful photo of beautiful abandoned cranes and metal junk. The record itself is quite decent though far from the best that Grain Belt can and already did. Feedbacks are dominating in this tape and they almost never get silent. Metal junk abuse is pushed somewhere more in the distance. And that is most likely everything that was used for this record. Squeaking of contact microphones, chaotic distorted clanging of metal and more or less usual harsh noise procedures. The record is quite plain and colorless. You can hear changing sound textures under feedbacks or stronger strikes being changed by contact microphone examining surface of some material. Then you get more banging, clanging, squeaking, but feedback in the front is dominating. Despite the active physical charge that was needed to record such formless though continuously changing record, the A side ends like that. B side is slightly more interesting from the start. That's because you don't hear the absolutely dominating feedback, but some more textures that were hidden much deeper on A side, can be heard. Though this is not for long. After half of the tape feedbacks return. They are joined with other layers of squeaking and screaming, change its tone a little bit, but remain the core of this side and overall the tape. I think most of all while listening to this tape I miss these chaotic metal percussions, expressive abuse of metal junk, formless cloud of noise that suddenly explodes, disappears and then strikes back. The profile of this tape is slightly different as is the attitude towards the sound. Thus the result is different too. I don't say that it's a bad record. It's good. Especially good is the end of side B when after the long squeaks of feedback you are sunk in the sea of metal objects, dominating in low and mid frequencies. But there are quite little such episodes in the tape and the space filled with feedbacks disappoints and become boring quite quickly. Despite this fact, Grain Belt remains one of the most interesting and enjoyable harsh noise projects in the scene that radiates pure aggression and presents the highest quality noise. I'll be impatiently waiting for new Grain Belt releases with hope that this tape was just a short stop to enjoy the feedback madness and not the new direction of Grain Belt.

Format: CS
Released: 2011
Label: Skeleton Dust Recordings
Edition: 100