Dark Lingo

Although there have been bass-and-drum duos before, Pittsburgh’s Dark Lingo takes that basic formula and twists it into compellingly nightmarish shapes. Making human voices inhuman by passing them through various guitar effects pedals and then making them swim through the thick churn of hypnotic, distorted bass patterns and insistent drumming, Lingo creates noisy atmospheric music that you’d imagine being made by people who never knew a world before the industrial blight imposed by Skynet from the Terminator movies. The band’s closest musical kin is Chrome circa Half-Machine Lip Moves and Alien Soundtracks — utterly demented, unmindful of musical convention and devoid of conventional beauty, but still rich in originality. The group’s songs are more muscular than brutal, but there’s a thorny edge to the music that captures the feeling of industrial blight.