***Working tirelessly at their craft since 2001, HAIR POLICE are survivors of the rapidly-dissolving U.S. noise scene. Made up of MIKE CONNELLY (aka FAILING LIGHTS), ROBERT BEATTY (aka THREE LEGGED RACE) and TREVOR TREMAINE—the three Midwesterners have amassed quite a catalog between them, but somehow always hit hardest when they fuse their talents and work together. Mercurial Rites is the trio's first proper full-length since 2008's Certainty of Swarms, and in typically obstinate form doesn't pander to the noise scene's mass exodus towards the dancefloor. Instead, the record is as dirt-sodden and gruesome as the band has ever sounded, and marks an evolution in industrial noise without straying far from their original intentions. They've always been a consistent band, but Mercurial Rites does a pronounced job in distilling the raw energy of their defining early LP Obedience Cuts and fusing it with the disturbing soundscapes of later records Drawn Dread and Prescribed Burning. Tape-saturated bells and gongs push up awkwardly against pounding, funereal percussion and the kind of disembodied screams we last heard on '80s-era Whitehouse sides, and while the result might terrify some, it re-affirms what made the noise scene so alluring in the first place. It's an unsettling, punishing sound that revels in its own abstraction, yet every clank is meticulously placed, every screech of feedback so pointed that at times you forget the layers of distortion and fog altogether. We're simply left with sparse vignettes of darkness, and in the empty silence in-between the blasts of synthesizer or white noise, there's more horror than you could possibly imagine. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.