Gross Net - Quantitative Easing (2016)

Touch Sensitive surprise once again with an album for the “post-Brexit Dystopia” from local act Gross Net.

There's a whiff of the record collector to the manner Belfast’s Touch Sensitive operates; dabbling in soundtrack work from the city’s celebrated son David Holmes, scoring a Cherrystones compilation to putting out an LP from Barry Boxcutter’s conceptual side project The Host and reissuing obscure mid-70s psych rock on seven inch.

The label’s latest outing presents local Belfast act Gross Net, which began life as a joint project for Phillip Quinn (Girls Names) and Christian Donaghey from DNS act Autumns to explore other themes and ideas. After a debut, self-titled tape, Donaghey departed to concentrate fully on Autumns, granting Quinn full creative freedom of Gross Net.

Quantitative Easing expands on the Outstanding Debt tape Quinn released earlier this year, trading the odds and sods nature of that collection for a more fully-realised document of the Gross Net sound. This is a stark listen, suggesting Quinn’s outlook to be bleakly satirical as he runs the gamut of post punk angst and industrial darkness. Quinn might just get a call from Nic Winding-Refn’s music licensing minions if the highly-stylised director hears the slowly smouldering synth noir of opening track Citadel, whereas Citalopram and Still Life possess echoes of Karl O’Connor’s snarling White Savage Dance. The Body recalls the strobe-lit, saucy Cold Wave pump of Eleven Pond, dovetailing neatly with the heavily-sedated, slack-jawed psychedelia of Side Effects and the smattering of abstract electronic vignettes.