As you may know, "We Don't Go to Ravenholm" is the an infamous chapter in the critically acclaimed 2004 video game Half-Life 2. Involving a perilous journey through a trap- and zombie-infested Eastern European mining town, the chapter was praised for its atmosphere, tension and subtlety. "We Don't Go to Ravenholm" is also the title of a track on Castrovalva's 2010 debut album We Are A Unit, which can be praised for very little, with the possible exception of its merciful brevity.Let's be clear - I've nothing against messy, mercilessly loud, chaotic music. There is a difference, though, between music like that done well and music like that sounds almost self-conciously like a bunch of people in a room thrashing about meaninglessly, and for the vast bulk of the time Castrovalva, having apparently nicked their name from a 1982 Doctor Who serial, sound very much like examples of the latter brand. Indeed, the record goes so far as to almost seem designed to be as annoying as possible - the only audible words in the shouted, muddled vocal tracks are usually juvenile tirades of swearing, and songs often seem to stop incredibly abruptly, before the band launch into another rapid-fire dirge.Admittedly, the songs do occasionally flirt cautiously with listenability, as on "Triceratops" which is largely a fusion of drums, bass, white noise and a mixture of wailed and screamed vocals. Here and there you also notice a crude but mildly intriguing hard rock riff, but these moments are few and far between and are typically soon drowned out those awful vocals and some gaudy combination of cheap sound effects, cursing or maybe a faux-arty radio scan.All exuberance and no brains, We Are A Unit is a bassy, cacophonous set of songs which turns artless, aimless thrashing into a sort of ironic art form. It's also completely bizarre, which provides at least some small modicum of entertainment, allowing us to sit back and wonder what on Earth is meant to be going on. Dreadful, says I. Another TLOBF writer loved some of these songs on Castrovalva's self-titled mini-album last year, but for me they're barely listenable. As for you? Well, you'll have to decide for yourself.