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Needlegun Needlegun (MT6) At a time when every new four-adjective emo construction makes it sound like bands are utterly incapable of naming themselves, Needlegun has chosen its moniker perfectly, presenting 16 further adventures in shredding music's wheat until it's just a bunch of noises, from the flurry of reversed field recordings from a high-school drum clinic on "Projext Numb" to the glitching death-factory jams of "No Mo," which sounds like an internet-age upgrade of Einsturzende Neubauten's drill press and metal lathe symphonies. Natty Boh Dadaists unable to sit still, the band spits out squeaky blasts like someone committing frottage on an unsuspecting water balloon until it messily bursts, talking heads from Headline News and Telemundo turned into gray slush, agonized and multitracked saxophones that sound like a kennel full of puppies being hosed down, and of course sinus-clearing blasts of habanero feedback.

By the time iTunes grinds to "Miracle of Life," a live rock band has crawled out from the wreckage of the first nine tracks, and even the evil Simon Cowell could hum along to the singsong annoyance of "Scarlet Binoculars," though he certainly wouldn't wave it on the next round. Maybe it's just because the four Needlegunners are pranksters, but after all the tape abuse and hard-disc fuckery, the ambient guitar glow of "Moth Light" is actually pretty, even with all the wincing white noise that keeps welling up overtop. People may bitch that Baltimore has more noise bands than places to get a decent burrito, but even if you've lived here long enough to become indemnified to all the folks gathering in basements to play amplified tape loops of cat meows and banjos, we still get excited that a tiny subset of the youth of America is committed to this kind of retarded genius. Needlegun, especially in its less-hinged first half, offers a familiarly ugly and comforting blare.