Music relies on tension and release. In a harmonically-advanced form like jazz, chord frameworks may cycle through a maze of substitutions and modulations, shifting back to a recognisable tonal centre again for the resolution of the progression. In rhythmically-advanced music, which includes the end of heavy metal inhabited by the likes of Meshuggah, bands may squirm and twist through perplexing stop-start riffing, which aggravates the listener’s ears but which makes the crash-landing into an obliterating groove all the more satisfying. As musicians get more adept and adventurous, the squirming and twisting gets more baffling, and the landings get fewer, like a stunt cyclist getting ever more daring. Loincloth’s album, despite its jokey title, is so full of rhythmic tension, and so seemingly devoid of release, that your ears thirst for hooks like your mouth might thirst for water in the Sahara.

The band is an instrumental trio formed from the bones of tricksy tech-doom act Confessor, and their music can loosely be summarised as combining the jittering rhythms of the aforementioned Meshuggah with slight- ever so slight- hints of the wackier parts of the American doom and sludge environs. In the growling weight of some of its almost-bluesy almost-riffs the likes of Keelhaul may be inferred. Its defining characteristic, though is this jumpy restlessness, which often feels like an over-caffeinated child describing the sound of the former’s Nothing album in a preposterously exaggerated way. Tracks like Trepanning, Underwear Bomb or The Poundry (some of which are very short) weave incomprehensibly through labyrinthine time signatures, ratcheting up the rhythmic tension to an almost comical level, with little release in the form of an almighty pay-off groove. They are like rollercoaster rides, in which you feel yourself tugged higher and higher, getting more and more anxious, and then at the top you realise you have just arrived at another platform and you have to walk down the steps yourself.

So it is an inhospitable album, which may find many admirers amongst the more avant-garde crowd. The band cultivates a tight, gleaming metallic sound which feels precise and polished, and combined with the agitation levels of the riffing the result is pummelling. And if for much of its 40 minutes it is frustrating, it can also be majestic. The high-points are surely the likes of Angel Bait or Stealing Pictures, which shift down a gear into something slightly more plodding, allowing a degree of dark harmonic colour to seep into the guitar tones in a manner that reminds me strongly of a techy reworking of the slower numbers from mid-80s Metallica albums- The Thing That Should Not Be and so forth. And, occasionally, these fragmented riff-hints coalesce, albeit it briefly, into genuine hooks, like on the twisting exhilaration of Theme.

It won’t do to dismiss the album, as it achieves with precision what it sets out to do. It’s just that what it sets out to do will scare a lot of listeners away. It is an “active” listening experience: you have to take it head on and do battle with it, rather than sit back and enjoy it. And, I suppose, there isn’t really anything wrong with that.