Matt Brundage

Death From Above

Medium Image Medium Image The two CDs to your right may have only cost me about $10 a piece, but they’ve proven to be a much more expensive investment in the long run. I recently caused permanent damage to my car’s factory-installed speaker system while blasting Death From Above 1979’s “Romantic Rights (Erol Alkan’s Love From Below Re-Edit)” on the way to volleyball a few weeks ago. The song is little more than tribal-style drumming, a throbbing, distorted bass, and keyboards that sound like twin turbofans powering up before a sudden burst across the runway of an aircraft carrier. An indulgent six-minute mess of noise with, as one Amazon reviewer put it, no “socially redeeming value.”

My once-acceptable Saturn L-Series speakers now have clearly audible distortion, but only at certain pitches in the lower register. Certain bass sounds are now replaced with a slight vibrato. Not exactly a clipping sound, but still a clear sign that the speakers are trying in vain to reproduce certain sounds.

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