Noise Without Decay Archives

Last Rizla Premiere “Rebound” Video; New Album Noise Without Decay Out May 12

Posted in Bootleg Theater, Reviews on April 25th, 2023 by JJ Koczan

Greek sludge rockers Last Rizla release their new album, Noise Without Decay, on May 12 through Venerate Industries. And, well, I’ve heard it, and there’s lots of noise and not much decay, at least in terms of force-of-delivery, as the four-piece of G., C., K. and S. — it’s okay dudes, my name is initials too — craft the follow-up to their 2018 EP Mount Machine (review here), their sound is cast like a cruel shadow over the 40 minutes and nine cuts. Depending on what and when you count, Noise Without Decay is the band’s first long-player since 2009’s self-titled debut, but for a band who’ve shown such a penchant for doling out short offerings and splits, etc., over the intervening 14-plus years, they in no way seem uncomfortable in the form. You’d think they wouldn’t be used to it or something, but no.

The actual level of punishment meted out in a given song might vary, but Last Rizla are almost uniformly aggressive. Even the later “Mushy Peas,” which starts out at a sort of bopping-along-casual groove, shifts into more pointed, angular starts and stops and is topped by the blown-out shouts that populate each piece and give the entirety of Noise Without Decay such a post-hardcore vibe. But true to Freek Greek heavy, the story isn’t so simple as band-plays-style, and even truer to the Hellenic underground, Last Rizla know which rules they want to follow and which they want to break. Bookending opener “B52” and closer “B53” fuse punkish bite with tonal heft, and especially in the instrumental finale, they seem to be going for some nod to the ‘bomb-tone’ ethic of Floor, but even there, they keep a rock production, and the rounded edges of their tone and the methodical execution of “Bloody, Hairy” speak to a root in doom/sludge, no matter the actual tempo at which a song is delivered, be it the rager “No Way Out” answering the near-immediate burst of “B52” or the strident “Hades,” which is the longest track at 6:24 and reminds in its howling guitar offsetting dense tonal chug of Swarm of the Lotus, albeit not as harshly produced.

Which is what I’m trying to get at here. Even as compared to Mount Machine — and granted that was five years ago at this point, or four if you want to go by the fact that these songs were recorded nearly a year ago — the recording here by Iraklis Vlachakis allows for some breadth and the creation of an atmosphere of more than aggression or bludgeoning. As consistent as the shouting, hard-riffing and nodding grooves are throughout, Last Rizla circa this maybe-second full-length aren’t just one thing, even when they’re trying to convince you otherwise, and the movement behind their sludge is palpable. They make it rock, sprint, or stand up and bring itself down directly on the listener’s head with little thought to mercy or the manner in which that kind of violence tends to ripple. While even the title speaks to a kind of urgency, the material offers that and grit alike, mining individualism from the swaying build-up of centerpiece “The Debt” ahead of the more sprawling “Hades” and the caustic noise rocker “Classic Marathon,” which is duly stripped-down feeling at 3:47 and answers the earlier insistence of “Rebound” in its midtempo post-’90s nastiness.

Still, for as much as Last Rizla gnash and rip and tear and claw throughout the nine-song stretch, there’s depth to the proceedings — “Bloody, Hairy” drops a lyrical reference to misfortune, reminding that Last Rizla once upon a 2011 were involved in the Miss Fortune was a Henhouse Manager (review here) comp of then-up-and-coming Greek acts like 1000mods, Sadhus, the Smoking Community, Bad Trip, Yassa and others — and as their scene comes to maturity within some of those other groups and without, Last Rizla provide a balance (a mix by Kowloon Walled City‘s Scott Evans doesn’t hurt there either) between bombast and purpose, and the places they go throughout Noise Without Decay are engaging almost in spite of themselves. If you can hang with pissed off sludge rock, that’s still very much at the foundation, but they show that such designations can be as much a beginning as an end all through the record, and while “B53” ends in done-blown-up noise — think Neurosis consumed by the distortion at the end of “Stones From the Sky”; you can hear it in the video below — even in that last moment, there’s no letup, no decay, no flinching from the purpose they’ve established as their own. The word for that kind of thing is “righteous,” and so they are.

Life is full of surprises and if you had ‘Last Rizla roaring back with a more mature and still-plenty-brash second full-length’ on your 2023 Heavy Underground Bingo card, I salute you, but either way, the pit they dig out in this new batch of songs isn’t to be underestimated, and one might find that the more one listens to Noise Without Decay, the more likely skin is to crawl. Don’t worry though, that’s the whole idea. It’s supposed to make that happen. So let it.

The clip below is the premiere of “Rebound,” and should give you some idea of what the band are going for in terms of general construction/destruction throughout. By all means, please dig in and enjoy:

Last Rizla, “Rebound” video premiere

We recorded Noise Without Decay during May and June 2022 in our studio, Créme Chalet, in Kallithea, Athens, Greece.

This city is ruthless, constant and grey. The weather was and has been swinging between dark and stormy but at times sunny and mostly warm.

Noise Without Decay was recorded by Iraklis Vlachakis, mixed by Scott Evans (Antisleep Audio – also guitarist for Kowloon Walled City) and mastered by Saff Mastering.

Like good sauerkraut, it’s now fermenting and will be released by Venerate Industries this May.