WL//WH Video Of The Day: BITUMEN “Twice shy”

Video Of The Day BITUMEN  

Guy Harris from Winternationale told me recently, “there’s something in the water here”. Melbourne independent underground music scene hasn’t been so fervent and exciting in a while.

Apparently a very different city to the rest of Australia in many ways, colder and wetter climate instead of constantly hot and sunny gives a distinctive art-rock and experimental sensibility with a darker feel, heavily supported by plenty of live music venues and community radios, even 150-200 bands playing across the city in the weekends.

The ‘veteran’ Total Control, then Masses, Kollaps, Polish, Gold Class, Venetian Blinds, Regional Curse, Nun, Constant Mongrel just to name a few… 

Renowned for their incendiary live performances, post-punk industrial five-piece Bitumen are on the verge of releasing their debut album “Discipline Reaction” due out in October via local label Vacant Valley, produced by the band with the help of Alexander Anglias (The Faculty, Ill Globo) – the phantom fifth member, and realised with the guidance of Peter Bramley, (Vacant Valley executive) who created the idiosyncratic cover art.
 
The new single “Twice shy” is filled with icy sharp screeching guitar riffs generating swathes of lush ominous noise, backed by pounding and tight rhythms, pervaded by an uncompromising sense of tension and claustrophobia. Heightened by the angry, jabbing, howling vocals drowned in deep emotional haziness encapsulating hints of fear, anxiety and paranoia.
Power, atmosphere and electricity, another slice of dark beauty from Melbs.

The video portrays a chaotic scene in a lounge with overturned lamps and chairs. There appears to have been a struggle as the band plays with flashing lights and shadows creating distorted, elongated, haunting facial features. A barricaded door leaves us with the question, Is someone trying to get in or out?

Keep up with Bitumen:

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