This Baltimore duo have been around for a couple of years, but are just now coming out with their first real full-length, released through Baltimore's finest imprint for all things noisy and bonkers, MT6. The first time that I heard these cats was when they played with Wildildlife in a basement in Baltimore a few years ago, where the duo of Jane and Josh blasted the entire block with their deafening brand of mutant synth-disco/no wave/gabber/grind weirdness. Both of 'em rock some massive keytar-like appliances, and stick to a fairly rigid formula: songs are generally one-to-two minute micro-bursts of ominous synthesizer chords and whooshing, sweeping electronic noises over jackhammer drum programming that's somewhere in between techno/disco throb, drum-machine blastbeat, or violent gabber, depending on the song, while Jane utters a hair-raising high pitched scream over it all, or croons in a narcoleptic speak/sing cadence. They've been compared to bands like The Locust and Genghis Tron because of their synth-based instrumentation, but those references are wholly inaccurate. This shit is difficult and definitely not pretty, and almost totally devoid of what I'd call hooks - what this does sound like is brutal digi-grind beats trading off against mutant techno throb while the vocals channel the sound of Lydia Lunch with 75,000 volts of electricity being rocketed straight into her spinal column, while cheapo 8-bit melodies, harsh industrial textures, icy robo-funk synth basslines and atmospheric ambience scuttle out of the thick backdrop of synths and samplers that Abiku employ. I can hear trace elements of old school industrial like Clock DVA, Severed Heads and Controlled Bleeding in here, but these industrial qualities are cranked to mach ten and almost totally obliterated by the relentless computerized blastbeats. I just caught them again as the opener for the Brutal Truth/Pig Destroyer show that went down at the Talking Head last week, where Abiku took the stage in what looked like silver Lam� robes and proceeded to totally polarize the audience with their screeching, industrial techno-disco-blast. They're definitely one of the most brutal bands to inhabit the Baltimore freakscene, that's for sure. As far as this disc is concerned, Novelty isn't an actual new album, but rather a collection of tracks from their Novelty demo from 2002 and some later demos that have been reworked and rerecorded, along with an additional enhanced section of the disc that contains all of their demo tracks and singles that were recorded between 2002 and 2005, all available as MP3s, and since most of that stuff is way out of print, this is the last place you'll find these early Abiku jams.