Various Artists – ISVOLT

It’s easy to get cynical about a burgeoning subgenre, especially these days when any journalist can link 4 or 5 similar acts across the world into an ill-defined ‘scene’ – but consider witch house for a moment. Incepted this year from a growing interest in the crossover possibilities with darkened noise, industrial squalls and delirious, rumbling electronic; publications found a new dance darling. The underground craze surrounding dubstep has receded as the genre skyrocketed towards stratified divisions and public acceptance, now up-and-comers are testing the waters of harsh experimentalism and brain-pounding euphoria. ISVOLT is a compilation that scrounges together nine standout tracks from Google-proof producers and makes the best case I’ve heard for the relevance of the new sound.

The artists featured get off on the teeter between roaring, static-soaked drones and dance floor hedonism. The percussion of these songs is pure club, shattering handclaps, pulsing bass punches, bone-crushing synth blasts – the young guns crafting these bangers find beauty in pure excess. The mysterious ∫Ω∫ opens with ‘Misery Walk’ – pairing snowblind, disordered haze with thundering low-tones, you hear Wolf Eyes, Portishead and Lil Jon in the same space, crushing the pretenses that divide influence. Fostercare puts a dislocated, boxed-in voice over drowned keyboard treble-shills in his Reznor tribute ‘Cold Light.’ The metallic scraping of //TENSE//’s ‘Versus Man’ is a vintage industrial nightmare and the rabbit hole simply gets denser when he introduces curdled screams and a trouncing electro bridge. There are not the traditional ingredients to crowd a rave, but the primal intensity of these songs defeat squeamish aversions to noise. They hit the body the same way sweaty 808-driven mish-mash of the top 40 does – punishing, physically demanding, but utterly enthralling in the right moments.

A few of the songs dwindle a little longer than welcomed, Mater Suspiria Vision repeats a woofer-flattening rupture on ‘Ritualzz of the Crack Witches’ till all the feverish satisfaction is drained out – but that’s almost expected given the infantile state of the scene. What’s more surprising is how fully developed most of the artists already are; creating vast, apocalyptic landscapes that stretch far beyond the expected means of a bedroom producer. In a sense their sound comes as a logical progression to 2009’s buzzed-about pseudo-genre chillwave. While those musicians found nostalgia in the fuzzy, day-glo memories of Saturday morning cartoons and 16-bit video games – the witch housers get retrospective in a different way. The golden age of grim post-punk and shadowy coldwave has long passed them by; so they submerge themselves in that rich, record-store history, while bringing in the music they love today – torpedoing dubstep, amped-up dance, otherworldly noise – coming the other end as something they can earnestly call their own. It sounds throwback in design, but remarkably forward thinking in practice; and ISVOLT makes a terrific argument for the subgenre’s legitimacy. If this is the first batch, keep your eyes peeled for what’s next.