I still vividly recall seeing Earth Ball when they played Cafe Oto in May last year touring their debut album, It’s Yours.  It was an evening of quite remarkable sonic intensity, one rooted in improvisation that fashioned a soundscape where the intricacy and experimentation were dedicated to feeding the most utterly unforgiving melding of discordance and groove.

The Vancouver Island band are now back with their second full length, Outside Over There.  The band’s ability to throw a dummy to the listener remains undimmed as the album opens with an excerpt of comedian Stewart Lee amid jarring scrapes of saxophone, before a slab of savagely metallic riffage is unleashed and the saxophone erupts into a full-bore scream to herald the searing opener Helsinki.

Earth Ball’s emphasis is on relentlessly building and layering waves of instrumentation to peaks of cathartic fury, before deconstructing them all over again until nothing but a dissonant whisper remains.  The path to these ecstatic releases is never linear.  The percussion takes its starting point from jazz influences, before locking into to fierce passages of methodical, industrial-accented vehemence.  This provides the foundation for the venomous skronking of the feral saxophone and the guitar, which segues throughout from the melodically serpentine to the altogether more abrasively brawny.  Meanwhile, trumpet, clarinet, and atonal electronics flare amid the barrage.

There is an innate tension as dread and euphoria entwine in seething, cacophonous confrontation.  This disquiet is reflected in the vocals as they morph from spectral murmurs to rhythmic chants and disembodied spoken word.  As Earth Ball sweep from the infectiously choppy Hellfire Relations to the darkly squalling contortions of Where I Come From, and then from the bass shrouded reflections of Behind The Mall to the tempestuous oscillations of And Music Shall Untune The Sky, you have little choice but to submit yourself to the maelstrom.