(Noise Pollution/Karate Body)

http://noisepollutionrecords.blogspot.com/;  www.karatebodyrecords.com

For its first album in five years, Shipping News turns back to its earliest Louisville roots - read Slint and Rodan - and delivers a more aggressive outing in line with early-days releases from its nascence 15 years ago. Of course, members from those bands have played in Shipping News for years, so the math-rock tempo shifts and sludgy bottom end are in their DNA.  And recording these seven new songs - plus two from 2005's Flies the Fields - live at an all-ages hometown venue and a Tokyo gig has also dialed up the tension. And tense these songs certainly are, narratives filled with dystopian future-is-now-scapes of cornea scans, surveillance satellites and menacing helicopters hovering overhead while the music pummels you into delightful submission.

Opener "Antebellum" is an ode to Bush II's Orwellian reign built on thrumming bass, coruscating guitars and frog-march percussion that propel the narrative - "The first thing on our action list/Is to tour the debris/We can take our helicopters/We can take the limousine" - into paranoid police state-territory, and the sunny fare never lets up. It's present in the feedback-drenched black humor of "This Is Not An Exit" ("We've got cornea scans/Email scams/Root Beer Tuesday/Hot Fudge Thursday/Thank God it's Thursday") and the claustrophobic press-rolls that fuel the righteous religious indignation of "7s" ("Our God, he don't make mistakes"); it's also there in the aggro-punk rush of LP highlight "The Delicate" and the jitters-inducing sing-speak of Animal Farm allegory "Bad Eve" ("All us brown rice jack rabbits and lab rats, fattened up/Spliced into big-box telemarkets and hybrid pyramid schemes").

Our post-apocalyptic destiny reveals itself in toto with the jackhammer tempo and chest-caving percussion of the finale, "Do You Remember the Avenues," where lichen and treadleweeds have overrun L trains, fax machines and building lobbies, and the only trace of humanity is its ghost-like silence. Shipping News, like its forebears, doesn't traffic in pop formulas or polite liberal sloganeering - and sometimes that's exactly what's called for.

DOWNLOAD: "Antebellum" "The Delicate" BY JOHN SCHACHT