The aural monoliths erected by Kevin Drumm and Daniel Menche, though volatile in temperament and thick as treacle, have something fundamentally elemental about them. Guttural, droning tones and fragile high-register lines crush together like a coming storm or ring lonely like the sound of telegraph wires in the wind.

Although the inclination in such a setting may well be to spell out the sheer brute force or physicality of these processes, Drumm and Menche implement it merely as a molten centre, out of which spread similarly untamed yet precise and surprisingly subtle tendrils of sound that replicate and reverberate in an invigorating, albeit restrained, manner. Ergo, rather than push the noise to extremes, they sculpt it - duration and volume become raw materials instead of endpoints. The primary advantage to such an approach is that the music remains garrulous without clutter. In addition, despite the high tension, the duo maintains a sinuous fluency, and displays no small amount of stamina along the way.

On the other hand, such commitments are not made without a certain cost, and in this case, it comes in the form of redundancy. Irregular, fragmented pulses inject a degree of movement in certain moments, but it is scarcely enough to dislodge the proceedings from a pattern that, all things being equal, comes to feel much too simple for artists of such well-established backgrounds. This is not to condemn the work on a whole. As the pair explores a network of searing, alienating avenues of noise, buoyed by gravel-scrunching rhythms and an almost gothic foreboding air, they remain steady-handed and never lapse into unfocussed dabbling. As such, taken against each artist's background, Gauntlet unpeels another fascinating layer of skin in their respective musical personas.