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Recent FatCat signings, Abdomen, are a Netherlands power trio, based in Leeuwarden, Frisia, up in the country’s North. Sometimes described in the Dutch press as “post-grunge garage”, they themselves are keen to avoid any pigeon-holes or genre labels.
The band consists of Roel Meijer on drums, Ate Kamsma on bass, and Peter van Beets on vocals and guitar. All come from families passionate about music, but only Roel received any training in the traditional sense. Roel and Peter are old school friends, who reconnected some years after graduation with the idea of making music. The subsequent jams resulted in Abdomen, a name that they joke reflects the directness of their approach and attack - a “gut feeling”.
In Leeuwarden, Abdomen began promoting shows, and releasing the odd bit of vinyl, under the banner, Magneet. Away from any big city, they feel that they’re free to create, unaware of, unaffected by, any vogue or hype. Introduced to FatCat by a mutual friend, the band were impressed by the imprint’s apparent we-release-whatever-we-want-regardless-of-genre attitude, and incredibly happy to find a home alongside label mates whose work they admire, such as Public Body, Pure Adult, Psychotic Monks, TRAAMS, and Jennifer Touch.
Thanks to COVID-19, Abdomen’s new, sophomore long-player, Yes, I Don’t Know, took something like 2 years to record. Working with Rasmus Bredvig, at Tapetown, in Aarhus, Denmark, the songs were fine-tuned through extensive rehearsal, performance, and sometimes totally transformed in the studio. The lead single, Dazed, for example, began as a demo set at a frantic pace. It was Rasmus who suggested slowing it down - “Something like 5 times” - morphing, mutating, the track into an epic, melodic, psyche mantra. A heavy, heavy hypnotic groove. With a chanted vocal and wall of phased, psychedelic shredding, there are echoes of outfits such as Loop and Spacemen 3 - their stoned / stoner “aesthetics”, all be it turned up to 11. A head-banging, trance-inducing, transcendental raga, with its sights set on spiritual lift-off, the piece aims to create a path away from the negative toward a more positive way of life.
Damage Tool is a ditty about experiencing a panic attack, while racing through a city alone. Noticing that you’re breathing weirdly, before ultimately regaining control. Rapid, repetitive metallic riffing, that recalls Atomizer-era Big Black (back when Steve Albini was name-checking Electrifying Mojo, Detroit’s ground-breaking proto-techno radio DJ), describes this journey. While reaching relief, release, and epiphany, Van Beets screams, “Life feels so much better now!” On Numbers Meijer’s drums are filtered and fucked with, resembling a busted, dusted drum machine. Kamsma’s bass is fingered furiously. The combined attack coming on like a ramped, revved up Joy Division as the song tells its story of buckling under the pressure, the need to conform to the norm. Weird Shapes is about bucking routine to create new possibilities, opportunities, and set to breakneck bashing. Careering, carving out harmonic hollows, where the message is delivered. Its frenzied thrash, perhaps, surf guitar-derived. Neurotic details the shedding of strange habits. Packing plenty of punk power another point of reference is early, arty, Sonic Youth, while post-rock dynamics are also hidden within the hectic arrangements. Fish I and II, though, are “ambient interludes. Treated field recordings, “harvested” from surrounding factories, and pile-driving plants, intended to convey the oppressive, depressive nature of Abdomen's industrial hometown environment. I is the more “intense” of the pair.
The album’s title track, Yes I Don’t Know, opens with fragile, picking, floating in reverb. For a second fooling you into thinking that you’re listening to a Robin Guthrie / Cocteau Twins tune, before serrated, cyclical slashing “serenades” Van Beets’ words concerned with the awful crushing, gaping hole, of a lover’s passing. The cut climaxes in cathartic / agonised cries of “I can’t turn around!”
When asked about their often trance-inducing rhythms and riffs, Roel explains, “The repetitiveness, and build ups, are designed to be something to lose yourself in”, and states that this is inspired, in part, by the motorik of ground-breaking kosmische band, Neu!
Good Vibes rails against people putting a dysfunctional label on you. Songs such as Salmon play with hardcore US punk. Violently stopping and starting it tells the tale of the titular fish, exhausted by its efforts swimming against relentless opposing currents. According to the band, it might be metaphorical.” Exhale, a furious space rock flight, as incendiary as, say, Icarus Line’s Penance Soirée, finds its protagonist taking a deep breath, knowing that something within themselves, how they’re behaving, ain’t right. The almost funky, Das Kapital, reworks a riff borrowed from one of Abdomen’s previous side-projects / offshoots. Both the band and the song are / were named after Karl Marx’s famous text on the economic structure of society, the lyrics dealing with the fight to fit in, feeling accepted, yet still constantly corrected for getting it wrong.
Peter’s lyrics can sometimes be extremely personal, but the band are at pains to point out that it’s the listener’s interpretation that’s all important. In the past Abdomen have been called “angry”, however, if the album has an overriding message or theme, then it’s about coming to terms with your emotions, cauterising wounds, growing, and moving on.
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