Fucking Hell is the debut LP (I think, it's hard to tell with Bandcamp releases sometimes) from UK hip hop artist Charlie Valentine aka No Home. It is a release that lives up to its name in both quality and content. Valentine has, up to this point, released only singles and small Eps, one of which Fucking Hell is apparently the more generously proportioned younger sibling of. Recorded in the shadows of 2019's hello, this is exploitation EP, Fucking Hell has a lucid, dreamlike and cogently detached quality to it that serves to provide just enough distance from the pain examined on the album to allow the listener to get a full picture of the soul-digesting malaise at its source without being completely consumed by it. It's the difference between watching a Saw movie vs actually being one of Jigsaw's victims. Only here, the torture devices employed are just the everyday mechanisms of the state, society, and market that conspire, invisibly, like the hand of God, to keep someone trapped in their bedroom, drifting down a well of depression with dwindling hope for escape. It happens to more people than you might think.
Valentine's flow on Fuckign Hell rotates between languid, marbled rattles, atonal melodies, and heart-bearing plangent refrains. Punk and garage rock bare a distinguishable burden of influence for the beats here. A furry coat of feedback on "Drink! You're One of Us" does an admirable job of keeping Valentine's tight-jawed, tear-stained soul bars warm, while the Segall-esque amp-fire and gainful basement rumble of "4x4" gives a terrene tether to the lofty torment of their star-catching vocals. Most of the vocal presentations here are only slightly augmented by effects and distortion, with the exception "Secondary Actor," where Valentine's vocals skips and double backs like a VHS tape that has slipped off its supply reel, allowing each syllable to ricochet and narrowly thread the hoops and loops of a skeletally sequenced fusion of new age beats.
The highlights of the album, the anchor points of it's emotional polarity, runs along to two axis points. On one end, there is the bombastic and gothic, Siouxsie-esque, vigil for mental health and former-clarity, "I Couldn't Cry Before I Wrote Eps." On the other side, an acoustic, one human duet, "The Perfect Candidate." Both tracks express a desire to be able to move fluidly through the world, to abate life's frictions and be fulfilled in one's emergence into public life. Each track extrapolates on this desire in radically different ways. "I Couldn't Cry Before I Wrote Eps" expresses itself more whimsically with its downcast mood and the windy, growl of its production, while the "The Perfect Candidate" is more direct in its unadorned indictment of the requirement that we give up our time and lives to an employer in exchange for the opportunity to live. The requirement that we disappear into the marginal fulfillment of a stranger's desires in order to survive is one of the great crimes of our current age.
And let's face it job hunting, the subject of "The Perfect Candidate" is dehumanizing. The process asks you to dissolve any rough and human qualities of your personality and presentation in order to comport one's self to the abstract expectations of a potential employer. Fulfilling these expectations is a condition of your survival. Job hunting will rob you of your soul if you let it. The great hope when you send out that first resume is always that there will be some part of you that will be able to resist the sanding down of your personhood that must occur to sustain yourself through the search for, and gaining of, employment. That there is some part of you recalcitrant enough to be leftover after you've been molded to suit another's desires by various "voluntary" processes. That's assuming you can even get hired at all. The wearing process will occur whether or not you ever actually squeeze a paycheck out of it. The only thing worse than being exploited for your labor, is not being exploited for your labor at all.
As dark as the places that Fucking Hell explores, there is always a light shining through. And that light is Valentine themself. A unique talent making music that could not be more prescient under present conditions. We may feel like we are living in hell now but at least we have some pretty cool people to share the pit with.
