We’ve featured Vancouver‘s Aversions on several occasions in recent years, the outfit bursting into our awareness in 2021 with the frantic ‘Sharp Left Turns‘. “Regardless of what the title suggests, the song ploughs straight on the band’s uncompromising course, pitching the listener into a tide of pummelling drums and streaky guitars,” we wrote in our review, while “[Sam] Coll’s vocals veer from sarcastic sing-speak to vitriolic yelling from within this cacophony, a discontented preacher unhinged by the sorry shape of the world around him.” Later album You Wanted The Bike built upon this style, songs like ‘Undecider‘ charging shadowy post-punk with the bite of eighties hardcore, while single ‘Wormhole‘ showed off a slightly more subdued, brooding dimension, albeit retaining the familiar snarl.
Now Aversions are back with ‘Base Case’, the first glimpse of a much anticipated new full-length album. With a taut central rhythm and decidely nocturnal mood, the song unspools with the momentum and inevitability of a paranoid neo-noir thriller, every passing minute sinking deeper into a dangerous, miserable world. “All started things must end,” as Coll sings with fervid conviction. “I guess there’s a bit of the… / Flesh and blood brain box / Stuck in the silicon… / Sprayed like a crime scene! / Look for my fingerprints… / Dust of the infinite… / Nothing this limitless, / Works quite the way we…” Such a stream of statements and imagery is the backbone of the sound, and on the track goes, barrelling towards a conclusion that might not be the answer it is looking for, but a terminus all the same.