Think of a noise underground post-punk supergroup comprised of members of Mecca Normal, the Dead C, and New Zealand songwriter Peter Jefferies, and one could expect 2 Foot Flame to be a pretty bleak affair. The first album -- a somewhat floored effort which enlisted Dead C guitarist Michael Moorley alongside the ghostly duo of Jefferies and Jean Smith -- resulted in a clash of willful abstraction and songcraftiness that is at moments sublime and at others touching on painful. On Ultra Drowning, things don't seem to be getting any better; a similar sonic and emotional purge is committed to disc and is as tense, disconcerting, and confrontational as the Dead C and Mecca Normal. Oddly enough, Ultra Drowning calls to mind the experiments of the U.K. post-punk group Crass. Not just by nature of Jean Smith's poetics, which are as rhetorical as Annie Anxiety, but by the fact that track by track the album sounds more like a noise rock compilation in the way that works like Christ the Album were thrown together like Kurt Schwitters' collages. Ultra Drowning has some fairly loose, abstract ideas which for the duration are quite thought-provoking if you can meet the challenge of repeated listening -- if the underlying tension doesn't get to you. ~ Skip Jansen, Rovi

1		Sample Stars
2		Resin Box
3		Peacock Coal
4		I Think You're the Weird One
5		Everwilling
6		Pipeline to Vertigo
7		Ultra Drowning
8		Salt Doubt
9		The Dance Alone
10		Lunar Intuition