Black Dice

If the Strokes revived vintage CBGB rock and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs embodied Brooklyn's hipster cool, Black Dice represented the cutting edge of New York City's postmillennial punk. The foursome started out in the Providence, RI, noise scene, which was established by Rhode Island School of Design students and centered on the legendary underground venue Fort Thunder. Unlike Providence's other leading band, Lightning Bolt -- a bass-and-drums duo who recycle riff-happy heavy metal into amphetamine-kicked skronk -- Black Dice set about tearing apart the rigid structures of '90s hardcore.

When Black Dice's lead screamer, effects-board maestro, and youngest member, Eric Copeland, elected to attend New York University, his guitarist brother, Bjorn, bassist Aaron Warren, and drummer Hisham Bharoocha decided to move with him to Brooklyn. Their first, self-titled release after the move, on respected New Jersey hardcore label Troubleman, sounds like a building collapsing: Screeching and buzzing guitar and bass crash into convulsing beats, while Eric's wordless cries approximate both outrage and anguish. Stripped of recognizable repetition and language itself, the songs don't even have names.

Originally known for assaulting audiences at their shows -- both physically, by jumping into the crowd swinging, and sonically, by cranking their amps to almost literally unbearable levels -- Black Dice slowly began focusing on musical performance, attentively twiddling knobs and pushing buttons in order to orchestrate layers of on-the-spot loops and yet more obscurely wrought noise. Cold Hands jumpsfrom splintered screamo to almost pastoral, yet still creepy, passages: The hushed title track's jagged motif could be the slow winding of a music box, its pretty melody reversed and twisted, or ghostly echoes in a deserted boatyard.

Beaches and Canyons, released by much-hyped upstart Manhattan label DFA, fully revealed Black Dice's long-simmering fetish for Japanese noiseniks the Boredoms, whose experimental thrash punk gave way over time to an expansive, spiky psychedelia. (Back-to-nature Brooklyn-by-way-of-Baltimore aggregate Animal Collective also influenced Beaches and Canyons.) Black Dice drummer Bharoocha, who spent part of his childhood in Japan, creates tribal polyrhythms instead of breaking beats; Eric literally coos, whoops, and screeches like a monkey; and everyone tries their hand at gee-whiz effects tools, including the "Korg Kaos Pad, Flip 2 Power VT-X Tremelo, Electro Harmonix Poly Chorus, and DOD Gonkulator." (We're not making these up, although they might have.) However Black Dice made it, the combination of whipping feedback, frenetic rhythms, and tidal washes encapsulates the concrete jungle's controlled chaos unlike the sound of any other New York City band.

The hushed, amorphous Creature Comforts was made, painstakingly, to be heard on headphones: The highly processed guitars, hand drums, and God knows what else subtly suggest surf, dub, and shoe gazer but also Ed Wood sound effects, jungle racket, and conversation. (NICK CATUCCI)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide