Controller Controller

As Controller.Controller prepare to release their first full-length album, we are asked to consider the “X-amounts”. What are the elusive ingredients that set this band – and, perhaps more importantly, this record – apart from all others? Where will this collection of songs take us? This is, after all, the band that called its first EP, History, thus setting it along a continuum of music past, present and future.

Perhaps the key to X-Amounts is the way singer Nirmala Basnayake injects the frequently staccato rhythms with warmth, longing and memorable melodies. When she pleads “Don’t go” on the spare and eerie song, “The Raw No,” there’s no specific destination leading her subject astray, but the danger of detachment is reason enough not to separate.

Maybe the heart of the band is wrapped within the tight confines of Ronnie Morris’s bass lines, clinging unflinchingly to Jeff Scheven’s disco beats while fighting off a laser-guided guitar assault. While Scott Kaija and Colwyn Llewelyn-Thomas have a reputation for guitar lines that stab and dance, X-Amounts’ “Tigers Not Daughters” begins with a rumbling riff that would do Slayer proud. There are no easy answers to this equation.

So perhaps the essence of Controller.Controller isn’t really for us to know. The X-Amounts are infinite.

When asked about the meaning of ‘X’, Basnayake explains:

“’X’ is a placeholder for so much, from things dirty and forbidden to things that run along a straight edge. ‘X’ can symbolize a kiss but it can also symbolize poison. ‘X’ can announce resistance as well as crossing paths and crossroads. ‘X’ stands out and ‘X’ marks the spot. ‘X’ is a letter that can express the sound of a group of letters, like a phonetic union. ‘X’ is our common chromosome. ‘X’ can even indicate something that has been eliminated, something of the past, but this is not the case with us. The future of this band is the undetermined ‘X’; precisely because it is so, we can make it whatever we want.”

With much of the past year spent touring with Death From Above 1979, VHS Or Beta, The Organ and numerous other bands, Controller.Controller cultivated the songs that form X-Amounts. There’s no better way to know what sounds good to an audience than by playing it live, so it makes sense that there’s a flow to X-Amounts that only happens when a real connection is made. And whether the connection is made on the dance floor in front of a stage or on headphones attached to an iPod, there’s no doubt that in the end X amounts to Controller.Controller.