Band:	Modern Technology
Album:	Conditions Of Worth
Style:	Noise rock, Sludge metal
Release date:	October 2023

01. Dead Air
02. Lurid Machines
03. Salvation
04. The Space Between
05. Fully Detached
06. Lane Control
07. Conditions Of Worth
08. Believer

As has been said before, modern technology is both a blessing and a curse; while it has contributed significantly to the deterioration in social discourse in a pivotal period of human history, it has inspired the name of a good band.

I discovered London duo Modern Technology just over a fortnight ago, when they formed part of a 3-band bill along with Remote Viewing and Torpor, a seriously heavy line-up if there ever was one. All three groups are currently attached to the Human Worth label, and the latter two bands had already released two of the stronger sludge-based albums thus far of 2023. This gig also happened the day before Modern Technology released their own 2023 recording in the form of sophomore album Conditions Of Worth, which stacks up favourably to both Abscission and Modern Addictions.

All three bands owe a portion of their compositional DNA to sludge metal, but the extent and nature of this does vary; Torpor, for example, have stylistic tendencies belonging to post-metal on top of the sludgy harshness. Of the three, Modern Technology are the least sludgy, and the least metallic; the primary genre of Conditions Of Worth is arguably noise rock, but like bands such as Kowloon Walled City, Chat Pile and recent KEN Mode, that noise rock is taken in a very sludgy direction, adding a level of grim malevolence to the experience without serving up outright musical extremity.

One aspect likely influencing this approach is the fact that Modern Technology are a duo, with drummer Owen Gildersleeve accompanying frontman Chris Clarke; Clarke opts for a bass (along with occasional synths) instead of a guitar, but the pedals/effects applied to the bass take the tone to a point that feels midway between distorted guitar and regular bass. While it doesn’t deliver the outright crushing heaviness that multiple stringed instruments can deliver in tandem, the distortion is suitably gnarly, while some slightly cleaner bass tones also come through the mix to add nuance along with the synths; the trudging crawl that is the 10-minute title track serves as an excellent showpiece of how Modern Technology manage to create multifaceted soundscapes with only 2 instrumentalists.

The intensity does fluctuate across the album; opening song “Dead Air” very much orients towards the noise rock end of Modern Technology’s musical spectrum, with its fair share of cleaner bass grooves punctuated by bouts of distortion (alongside Clarke’s primal semi-growled vocals), but “Lurid Machines” slows things down and makes things nastier, dialing up the distortion and bleakness of the atmosphere. Modern Technology have a solid quota of punchy riffs in their arsenal, as the groovy “Salvation” pays testament to, but this same track also exhibits the duo’s more atmospheric inclinations when they drop the tempo for a dirge-like second half layered with synths.

That proclivity for atmosphere and material beyond pure riffage is given the greatest scope to shine on the album’s two longest songs, “The Space Between” and “Conditions Of Worth”. Stripped-down passages early in the former represent a probable influence from Neurosis, while the latter becomes increasingly textured as it progresses. “Conditions Of Worth” also shows the greatest range in tempo on the album; one of the few passages that flirts with the upper end of the ‘mid-tempo’ range can be found in the first half of this song, but the track really comes into its own in the plodding doomy second half, a sequence that relies upon post-metallish gradual evolution of a central motif to maximize its impact.

It is this climax to “Conditions Of Worth” that leaves me speculating on where Modern Technology can go on future albums; while the grim sludge/noise rock backbone of Conditions Of Worth is solid, the album is perhaps a bit monochrome in tone for the most part, without enough raw memorability to compensate for this. However, the duo have shown themselves very capable on this title track of deriving an emotional impact from taking a strong core idea and building upon it to keep escalating the intensity, and I suspect that pursuing this approach further could lead to some very effective results.