Chapel Hill’s own Archers of Loaf kick off their 1994 EP “vs. The Greatest of All Time” with “Audiowhore,” a blistering, gigantic anthem defined by its dramatic shifts in dynamics. It opens with a semi-ambient one minute intro, offering scraps of found noises and distant, dissonant guitar sounds. This creates a foreboding atmosphere, contextually very different from the more straightforward lo-fi indie rock and noise pop of their debut album before this. The pseudo-candid soundbite “Is this recording?” brings in the anxious, repeating guitar line from Eric Johnson, tinges of noise and effects again heard distantly in the back of the mix, growing in the low end. After 30sec of tension, it explodes without warning into a very full sound of the entire band playing aggressively, Eric Bachmann yelping over the organized cacophony. It breaks up the wall-of-sound of the verse with a more stripped-back but equally nasty groove-driven chorus, really letting the raw guitar tones and drum pounding shine.
The production manages to make a bona fide noise rock track sound cleaner than their more traditional indie rock of their debut while retaining all of the bite and feedback. I actually sometimes have an issue with some rock/punk/metal/hardcore reliant on dynamic changes as it can sometimes feel like the auditory equivalent of a jump scare, requiring me to exit the immersion of music to quickly turn the volume down. The production (in tandem with writing) of this track is not an example of that, with the foreboding feeling of the soft parts foreshadowing something massive, and the mixing on the loud parts allowing the intensity of noise rock to give its full, brutal catharsis without shredding my eardrums to bits.