Get Me Free #127: BYSTS - Killer On The Road
By this point in the day you're probably bored to the back teeth of Christmas TV or drunk on booze, so let's take a break to darken the mood for the seventh of our twelve downloads of Christmas. This one comes from Salt Lake City's BYSTS (which is pronounced "beasts", or "beests" as they spell it), a duo who manufacture electro-rock that's designed to blend the darker side of shoegaze with the darker side of trip-hop. So it's a a bit like A Place To Bury Strangers interrupting a Tricky recording session, and actually ends up sounding not unlike something from 'XTRMNTR'-era Primal Scream.
That's a lot of good reference points, and they manage to live up to them with this pummeling industrial monster. You could call it coldwave, you could call it darkwave, but if anyone's invented a genre called post-apocalypticwave then this must be what it sounds like. The noise they make is huge and feels like brute force combined with a certain dexterity that's needed to give the attention to detail that prevents 'Killer On The Road' being just a hollow statement. There's depth and there are ideas, and there's a lot of groaning instruments and effects that will have your speakers quaking in terror.