Mind Rays - 2019 - Course of Action

PNKSLM – PNKSLM067

 A course of action is what remains after hesitation has become intolerable. The phrase belongs to military briefings, emergency plans, management meetings and private moments when a person realizes that continuing without choosing has itself become a choice. Mind Rays place those words above ten songs that permit almost no hesitation at all. The record begins moving immediately, changes direction with violent efficiency and disappears in under twenty-three minutes, leaving behind the sensation that a decision has been carried out before anyone had time to appeal it.

The title also suits the band’s second-album position. Their 2017 debut, Nerve Endings, introduced a volatile Ghent quartet whose garage punk often sounded as though the instruments were discovering their own strength while being played. Course of Action does not abandon that instability. It gives the instability an objective. The songs are sharper, the arrangements more deliberate and the recording sufficiently clear that every collision can be examined without reducing its force. Chaos has not been removed. It has been issued instructions.

Mind Rays themselves described the difference in terms of focus. Nerve Endings had developed from songs written across a longer period, while the second album was conceived as a connected record with a stronger flow and a more defined sound. That distinction becomes audible before the first track has completed its opening assault. Course of Action is not merely ten fast songs occupying the same sleeve. Its titles, pacing and production form a compact system concerned with preparation, damage, control and whatever remains after action has been taken.

“Makeshift Weaponry” is the logical place to begin. A makeshift weapon is an ordinary object whose purpose changes under pressure. It was not designed for violence, but circumstance discovers another use inside it. Mind Rays approach garage-rock materials similarly. Guitar, bass, drums and voice are familiar tools, yet their arrangement makes each sound newly dangerous. The guitar does not simply produce riffs; it snaps, jams and recoils. The rhythm section does not merely support the song; it repeatedly changes the floor beneath the vocal. Sis Sevens enters as another impact rather than a narrator floating safely above the machinery.

The track’s stop-start movement creates a strange combination of panic and discipline. Every halt feels capable of becoming a collapse, but the quartet returns together with enough precision to reveal that the apparent loss of control has been composed. This is one of the album’s defining pleasures. Mind Rays want the listener to feel the vehicle skidding without ever doubting that somebody still has both hands on the wheel.

Pieter-Paul Devos was particularly well suited to help capture that balance. Raketkanon and Kapitan Korsakov had already demonstrated how noise-rock production could preserve grotesque texture while making rhythmic and structural decisions brutally legible. Course of Action receives the same kind of attention. Distortion remains abrasive, but it no longer hides the relationships among the players. The guitar can scrape against the bass rather than simply merging with it. Drum patterns remain audible inside the overdrive. Sevens’ voice is pushed far enough forward that its rhythmic behavior becomes inseparable from the songs’ construction.

The band wanted the record to resemble its live impact, but “live” here does not mean casually throwing microphones into a rehearsal room and accepting whatever survived. Live force has been studied and rebuilt. The album recognizes that a performance feels explosive partly because several events remain intelligible at once: the exact moment a drummer stops, the bass note that makes the next return feel heavier, the guitar sound that opens a sudden pocket of air, the voice cutting across all three. Clarity does not domesticate the band. It gives every tooth its own edge.

“Maker’s Remorse” compresses an entire moral problem into sixty-six seconds. The title describes regret not in the person harmed by an object but in the person who created it. A maker may discover that the thing released into the world possesses consequences its design did not anticipate. The phrase can apply to weapons, institutions, relationships, technologies, political systems and songs. Once something has entered circulation, its author no longer controls every use.

The track is too short to develop this idea lyrically into an essay, which is precisely why the title works. The music arrives as consequence rather than explanation. It performs, damages the surrounding air and withdraws. Remorse does not prevent the object from having existed.

“Cease/Commence” continues the album’s command language. The slash is important. Stopping and beginning are not presented as clean opposites separated by reflection. They are placed against one another as parts of a single action. Something must cease so that something else can commence, but the transition may occur too quickly to identify which event is ending and which is being born.

The song’s short duration and very high velocity intensify that confusion. Sections seem to terminate by striking the beginnings of the next sections. A guitar phrase becomes a brake and an ignition simultaneously. Sevens’ delivery moves through the arrangement with the breathless authority of somebody issuing commands during a situation already beyond command. Mind Rays make the slash audible.

This is where the band’s hardcore instincts become especially valuable. Hardcore understands that form can be created through interruption. A song does not need to establish a comfortable groove and decorate it. It can produce meaning by repeatedly denying the continuation the listener expects. Mind Rays complicate that tradition with garage-rock abrasion and post-punk angularity, creating music that moves quickly without traveling in a straight line.

“Pristine Condition” introduces one of the album’s most useful contradictions. Nothing about Mind Rays sounds pristine in the everyday sense. The guitar is serrated, the vocal is strained, and the rhythm section seems willing to drag the entire recording across concrete. Yet the song demonstrates a different kind of cleanliness: every part has been reduced to its necessary function. There is no ornamental verse added to make the track longer, no solo included because rock custom requires one and no final chorus repeated after its work has been completed.

The group spoke of trimming songs until only their essential body remained. “Pristine Condition” is a perfect demonstration. Its nervous guitar and vocal shapes repeatedly double or shadow one another, making the band sound like a single mechanism whose different components have developed the same twitch. The result is compact enough to appear simple, but the simplicity has been achieved through removal rather than lack of imagination.

That difference matters throughout Course of Action. Short songs are sometimes treated as evidence that a punk band possesses a limited vocabulary. Mind Rays use brevity as editing. The songs are not short because the musicians have run out of material. They are short because the band has decided that surplus material weakens impact. Every section must justify the oxygen it consumes.

“Beasts Ahead” permits the first substantial alteration in the album’s surface. The title resembles a road sign warning that whatever lies beyond the current point cannot be expected to obey human traffic rules. The music responds by opening gaps inside its attack. Slower guitar passages and an unstable piano color briefly widen the field before the band resumes its advance.

These interruptions do not function as peaceful interludes. They increase apprehension because they remove the certainty supplied by continuous speed. When a fast punk song stops accelerating, the listener becomes newly aware of what might be waiting in front of it. The beasts have not yet arrived, but the arrangement has begun leaving room for their shape.

The piano is especially effective because its cultural associations differ from the guitar’s. Distorted guitar belongs naturally to punk aggression; an unsteady piano can suggest a damaged saloon, abandoned hall, children’s lesson or domestic instrument played after something has gone wrong in the house. Its appearance enlarges the song without requiring additional volume. Mind Rays discover that menace can enter through a side door.

“Head Back” begins with bass, guitar and drums driving toward the expected impact, but its final stretch changes perspective. The guitar broadens into something almost cinematic, revealing that the band’s cramped, high-pressure language can suddenly open onto a much larger horizon. The effect lasts only long enough to register before the song ends.

That restraint is important. Another band might have expanded the final idea into a five-minute psychedelic conclusion, but Mind Rays understand that one glimpse can be more powerful than full access. The listener sees the landscape through a door that immediately closes. “Head Back” becomes not only an instruction to move or retreat, but a description of perception being physically pulled backward to accommodate a space that appeared without warning.

The title can also suggest a body struck hard enough for the head to recoil. Physical movement remains encoded throughout the record. Tracks lurch, stop, tighten, split and throw themselves forward. The arrangements do not merely accompany images of action; they place action inside the listener’s sense of balance.

“Single File Line” turns order into another source of menace. A single-file line is one of the simplest ways to organize bodies: one person behind another, no lateral movement, each individual following the route established by whoever occupies the front. Schools use it, prisons use it, armies use it, factories use it and crowds instinctively form it when an institution provides only one narrow opening.

The track begins from a low bass presence before Sevens’ voice takes on an almost spoken or rapped cadence. The words function rhythmically, accumulating pressure before the band ignites around them. This is one of the moments where the vocal performance most clearly becomes an instrument. Speech, chant, accusation and percussion begin sharing the same space.

The song’s organization mirrors its title while resisting it. Bass establishes a route, drums and guitar join behind it, and the voice appears to lead. Yet the line continually buckles. Instruments move out of position, collide and reform. The music understands that order enforced too tightly creates the conditions for rupture.

Course of Action repeatedly returns to systems that appear controlled from the outside: weaponry, commands, pristine condition, lines, centers and seasons. The songs then reveal instability inside those terms. A makeshift weapon is improvised. A command contains contradictory instructions. Pristine condition is surrounded by abrasion. A single-file line becomes unruly. The album is fascinated by how quickly imposed order begins manufacturing its own disorder.

“Dead Center” places that tension at the geometric heart of an imagined target. The dead center is the point of maximum accuracy, but the phrase also contains death inside location. To be centered can mean balanced and secure; to stand at the center of a target is to occupy the most dangerous possible position.

The song uses that ambiguity to produce one of the record’s most immediate choruses. The verses remain tense and menacing, then the band opens with enough force to make the release feel explosive without becoming reassuring. A chorus in punk often provides community, the moment when a room can shout together. “Dead Center” allows that communal energy while preserving the sense that everybody has gathered at the exact place where impact is expected.

This may explain why the album sometimes seems to lack one oversized anthem while remaining remarkably coherent as a whole. Mind Rays are not arranging nine songs around the marketable centerpiece. The record itself is the event. Each song performs a different operation inside one sustained movement. The lack of a detached “hit” becomes a structural strength when the album is heard as twenty-three uninterrupted minutes rather than as isolated streaming candidates.

“Seasonal Disorder” makes instability cyclical. Seasonal change is ordinarily predictable: light shifts, temperature changes, plants respond and bodies adjust. A seasonal disorder is something returning with enough regularity to become part of the calendar while remaining disruptive every time it appears. It could describe weather, mood, social ritual or a community that repeatedly experiences the same crisis and continues calling it unexpected.

The track’s position near the end makes it feel like the album’s machinery has begun recognizing its own pattern. The previous songs act, stop, organize and collide; “Seasonal Disorder” suggests that none of those events is final. Disorder will return because return is part of its nature.

Punk has always been particularly good at expressing cyclical frustration. Its speed can sound like escape, but the short song often ends by sending the listener directly back to its beginning. Place the needle down again and the same emergency reappears. Course of Action uses that loop without despairing over it. Recurrence also creates another opportunity to respond differently.

“Godless Clay” closes the record by returning action to material. Clay can be shaped, compressed, divided, dried, fired and broken. Religious creation stories often imagine human life formed from earth and animated by divine breath. Godless clay removes the creator while retaining the material. The body remains, but no higher authority guarantees its purpose.

This is an unusually fitting image for the album’s final track. Mind Rays have spent twenty minutes showing objects, commands and systems whose intended meanings become unstable during use. “Godless Clay” leaves the listener with matter capable of being formed but no divine plan dictating the final figure. Action becomes responsibility. If no authority supplies the correct course, people must choose one and accept what their hands produce.

The title may also describe the band’s music. Distortion is clay. Rhythm is clay. The inherited forms of garage rock, hardcore and post-punk are clay. Nothing about those materials guarantees a meaningful result. Musicians must shape them, cut away what is unnecessary and expose the object to enough heat that it becomes capable of surviving outside the room.

The song ends without transforming the preceding violence into a tidy moral lesson. Course of Action does not offer a program for living, political doctrine or heroic destination. Its titles evoke decisions, but the music remains interested in the physical and psychological condition immediately surrounding decision: adrenaline, doubt, pressure, momentum and the fear that stopping may be as dangerous as continuing.

The black-and-red cover condenses this world into typography. “Course of Action” is stacked in heavy letters whose medieval or blackletter character suggests decrees, banners, institutions and inherited authority. The red against black can signify warning, blood, emergency printing or a message intended to remain visible under poor conditions. There is no band photograph and no illustrative scene explaining how the title should be understood.

The word “of” is transformed by a circular eye or target surrounded by radiating marks. It can be read as a sun, sight, alarm, wound or point of impact. The tiny connecting word becomes the sleeve’s central symbol, joining “course” to “action” while looking back at the person holding the record. The path and the deed are connected through observation. Someone is watching, aiming or being watched.

That visual economy parallels the songs. The artwork does not need a detailed image because the lettering itself has been converted into action. Likewise, Mind Rays do not need instrumental abundance because four people can generate more than enough internal friction. The restrictions clarify the gesture.

The production’s polish deserves careful distinction from cleanliness. Punk listeners sometimes distrust audible separation as though murk automatically proves sincerity. Course of Action demonstrates that definition can be vicious. Thomas Valkiers’ engineering, Bert Vliegen’s mix and Laurens Grossen’s mastering preserve the band’s impact while allowing each member’s decisions to register. The bass has shape rather than merely low-frequency bulk. Cymbal and snare attacks remain distinct. Guitar distortion has edges. Sevens’ voice can move from speech toward howl without being swallowed.

This focus makes the album feel faster than a blurrier recording might have. Speed depends upon perceiving events. When everything merges into one block, the ear receives constant intensity but fewer changes. Here, every stop, entrance and accent remains visible, so twenty-three minutes contain an enormous number of recognizable actions.

The brief studio schedule contributed to that concentration without turning the sessions into a rushed stunt. The band had already spent time developing the material and making demos with Devos. Four and a half days became the final act of a longer process, enough time to capture momentum without allowing endless revision to replace conviction. The record sounds considered because the thinking occurred before the red light demanded a performance.

Sis Sevens described the group’s ethic through honesty, purity and surrender. Those ideas can sound abstract, but Course of Action makes each one practical. Honesty means retaining the anger rather than polishing it into attitude. Purity means removing parts that do not serve the song, not pretending the music emerged without influences. Surrender means committing physically enough that the composed stops and turns still feel risky when performed.

The four musicians contribute different forms of that commitment. Adriaensens’ guitar supplies abrasion but also many of the small structural hinges that keep the tracks from becoming interchangeable. Lauweres’ bass repeatedly establishes motion before the rest of the band crowds around it. Gaston-Echeverria’s drums make sudden changes feel inevitable, an especially difficult task in songs whose entire structure may pass in ninety seconds. Sevens binds the mechanism together by treating vocal rhythm as part of the arrangement rather than something added after the music has been completed.

Ghent provides a useful context without needing to become a brand stamped across every riff. The city’s underground has supported punk, garage, noise rock and experimental bands able to move among small venues, rehearsal spaces and international touring networks. Devos’ involvement connects Mind Rays to the heavier and stranger activity surrounding Raketkanon and Kapitan Korsakov, but Course of Action retains its own scale. Where those groups may stretch noise into grotesque shapes, Mind Rays compress it into short bursts whose precision becomes part of the threat.

The Swedish label PNKSLM offers another crooked international route. A Belgian band records in Ghent and releases through a Stockholm operation whose catalog has made room for garage rock, post-punk, psychedelia and artists unwilling to behave like one coherent national scene. The pairing demonstrates how contemporary punk circulates: local identity remains audible, but the support network is assembled across borders.

That international movement suits music resistant to nostalgia. Course of Action contains clear traces of 1970s punk, garage rock, hardcore, noise rock and the tense rhythmic language associated with groups such as Refused and At the Drive-In. Mind Rays do not treat those references as proof that an earlier era was superior. They use them as accumulated technology. A stop-start riff, barked vocal, abrupt tempo shift or trebly garage tone is a tool available to anybody capable of finding another use for it.

“Makeshift Weaponry” therefore describes the entire inheritance. Punk itself was built by converting inexpensive, widely available rock equipment into instruments of social and aesthetic disruption. Every later generation receives those tools after their original shock has been partly absorbed by culture. The challenge is not to pretend the tools are new. It is to place them under enough present pressure that they become dangerous again.

Mind Rays achieve this through concentration rather than novelty for its own sake. There is no synthesizer introduced merely to signal evolution, no acoustic interlude designed to prove maturity and no extended experiment asking to be praised for leaving punk behind. The progression from Nerve Endings occurs inside the quartet’s existing language. Better arrangement, stronger sequencing and more precise recording reveal possibilities already hidden in the form.

This kind of development is often more difficult than a dramatic stylistic reinvention. A band can change instruments and immediately appear different. Mind Rays retain guitar, bass, drums and voice, then demand that every internal relationship become more exact. The listener may recognize the category instantly, but the exact character must be earned second by second.

The album’s compactness also changes how anger is experienced. Extended anger can become theatrical because the performer has time to display and decorate it. Course of Action gives frustration almost no room to pose. The emotion arrives while already doing work. Sevens does not spend long establishing why the voice is raised; the band assumes that pressure is the starting condition.

Yet this is not emotionally monotonous. Anger appears as panic in “Makeshift Weaponry,” regret in “Maker’s Remorse,” contradiction in “Cease/Commence,” suspicion in “Beasts Ahead,” enforced order in “Single File Line,” targeted force in “Dead Center” and existential material in “Godless Clay.” The record’s achievement is not shouting one feeling ten times. It is discovering ten physical arrangements for related states of urgency.

The short runtime invites immediate replay, and a second pass reveals that the album has been engineered as a loop of decisions. The improvised weapon leads to remorse. Remorse leads to stopping and starting. Control produces beasts, lines and centers. Order becomes seasonal disorder. The final clay is left without a god, ready to be shaped into another weapon or something else entirely.

Nothing on the record promises that the correct choice will be made. A course of action is not necessarily a good course. It is simply the route selected and enacted. This makes the title more unsettling than a slogan about confidence. Action closes alternatives. Once the band strikes the first note, all the versions of the song they might have played disappear behind the version being heard.

Recorded music preserves that choice permanently. The musicians can change the songs live, but the LP continues repeating the decisions made during those four and a half days at Hightime Studio. Every playback returns the same stops, the same attacks and the same moment at which a phrase was allowed to end. The album is therefore both immediate action and fossilized action, heat captured inside a reproducible object.

The vinyl editions reinforce that physical argument. Black and blood-red pressings turn the recording into grooves requiring the listener to choose a side, lower a needle and participate in the sequence. The red edition makes the cover’s warning color continue into the object itself, as though the title’s ink has soaked through the sleeve and entered the plastic.

Anyone who saw Mind Rays around the release of Nerve Endings or Course of Action may know how closely this recording captured the quartet’s live force, and whether the songs became looser, faster or even more violent once returned to a room full of bodies. Ghent listeners may also hear local connections and personnel histories invisible from outside Belgium. Those recollections would add valuable dimensions to a record deliberately built from movement rather than explanation.

Course of Action is short because the decision has already been made. Mind Rays remove the meetings, preliminary drafts and reassuring speeches, then begin at the instant when intention becomes consequence. Guitar, bass, drums and voice move together, separate, strike, recover and vanish.

Twenty-three minutes later, the room is quiet again, but the action cannot be withdrawn.