Germ Lattice - Gipping Through the Ages

Where exactly is Norwich? Out there somewhere, even if the map records it as technically close, in that jut of a land that's a bit south and quite a far bit more east, near Bungay, Dereham, Reepham, Wroxham and other places you've never been.  A medium-sized city nearer to London than Coventry but somehow faintly remote and with an aging population. It's where bands like Germ Lattice don't frequently come from but really actually should, the alchemical product of wyrd locale, big enough to be culturally sharpened, out of the way enough to germinate untethered and unattended to. Gipping Through the Ages is the trio's debut, and might well be the product of a bunch of London emigres, but nonetheless sweats with a mutant strain few acts generally labeled as 'post-punk' do in 2024. If they've any contemporaries then it's likely Mosquitoes, adopting as they do that same no-wave referencing attitude to anti-formalism and torched n tussled dynamics. The building blocks are relatively prosaic - bass, drums, synth - though the manner in which they're rendered is anything but, processed in fractured, unconventional ways that are highly suggestive of collapse and ruin. This is music being pulled apart and then deliberately mis-assembled, which is really what 'post-punk' was about in the first place, a shared idea with bands like This Heat, Metabolist (be cool to see those records back in print btw), early Liars and more recently, alongside Mosquitoes, CIA Debutante. So that's where Norwich is, right out there in the fallen down future.