Release year: 2024
Label: Zoharum

“Larmo means noise”, says a sticker I got along with this album. Larmo the music act, however, isn’t noise.

Well, except when it is.

Confused? Don’t worry.

By and large, the soundscapes of Larmo’s debut album Alarm are dominated by percussion. Heavy, domineering electronic beats are at the center of most tracks, aided and fleshed out by mostly rather minimalistic backgrounds of non-musical, digital electronics and effects. A thing such as melody is essentially unheard of on Alarm. What sparse more musical arrangements are heard are strictly secondary to the beats and the percussion.

The promo sheet throws around words such as techno, illbient and rhythmic noise. A check mark can safely be put in all of those boxes: Larmo has of all of these. The sparseness of the compositions, however, firmly plants Alarm’s quintessence within industrial music, away from any more accessible or conventionally listener friendly genres.

And then, indeed, there are moments when Larmo’s sound disintegrates structure into pure noise. The tracks HNW X and HNW XX are relatively short but violent bursts of glitchy, cacophonous, disjointed noise chaos. However, if the abbreviation HNW made you think of harsh noise walls – think again. These two tracks are far too active and changing to have anything to do with this most static niché of noise music.

I’ll admit to not usually listening to a whole lot of this kind of stuff. And Alarm makes it clear why. You see, the tracks are well put together and sound good – in fact they sound great on loud volumes – but they’re also boring as hell. There’s just nothing going on to keep me captivated. Some tracks have vocals, which should provide a hook to latch on to, but… well, in this case, it doesn’t work. (And see, that’s why I do like listening to EBM: it usually has some kind of melody to go along with the rhythm.)

A prime example is N.B x N.N featuring vocals by Gosia. The fervent beat and the distorted, angry punk vocals make me think of The Prodigy, but the sheer understatedness of the track – there’s very little going on beneath the beat and the vocals – just leaves me cold.

I’m sure people who’re into this kind of stuff will get a whole lot more out of this album than I do. I guess it’s sort of danceable in its own weird way, and if you find enjoyment in listening to rather jarring, minimalist industrial beats, this might be your jam. But it’s not mine. I just get kind of bored by this.

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