It’s tough to get a handle on Hysterics. For a flittering of a fewseconds you’ll be listening to some electronic cigar-lounge jamming which will suddenly rip away into guttural screamcore. It’s dissonant stuff, and this synth-driven violent explosion of experimentation sure isn’t for everyone. Rolo Tomassi are anything but delicate in their debut, jamming assaults of coarse noise into Explosions in the Sky-esque instrumentation, switching screamy vocals (courtesy of 18 year-old frontwoman Eva Spence) into waify humming over thumping percussion.

 

Opener ‘Oh, Hello Ghost’ is actually pretty creepy – wincing a weird electronic screech around echoey vocals that crash into straight-out hardcore for the final minute, and‘Scabs’ sounds like a Pivot and Mars Volta cocktail at points in between the erratic thrashing. There are a heap of these huge transitions all throughout the album, and it’s half interesting and half taxing to keep paying attention as Hysterics wears on. In the end it’s all too hard to get a grip on and – though inarguably novel – Hysterics is just a bit messy