It might be hard to imagine any immediate connection between the central event of Christianity and a rumbling, roaring, and often utterly unintelligible stomp of a noise album, but art is, after all, all about the connections one can make. Thus
Croce Via,
OvO's late 2008 release features various songs in different languages essentially restating the album title -- "way of the cross" -- along with other numbers given more profane names like the rollicking stop/start mayhem of "Tiki 2010." So much for nomenclature, though -- as with some of the more immediate releases on Load such as the work by
Sightings and
White Mice,
OvO aim to provide just enough in the way of atypical hooks to provide an anchor amid the murk, whether it's the explicitly
Yoko Ono-derived chanting on another tiki track, "Tiki 2020," or "Croce Del Gud" and its relentless bass, halfway to subharmonics and feeling more like an element from a
Prodigy song circa
The Fat of the Land than anything else. Meanwhile, song lengths range from the near minimal (both "Haiku 1" and "Haikue") to the sprawling (the concluding "Via Crucis," at almost a quarter of an hour long), while "Respiro" is almost relaxed jazz in the context of the rest of the album, even as it quickly builds to a throat-shredding conclusion. ~ Ned Raggett