"This is L.O.T.I.O.N.," not surprisingly, tells you an awful lot about the New York City outfit L.O.T.I.O.N. Multinational Corporation. Things like: what kind of industrial beats they prefer, how they like to layer the vocals into the mix, the farcical tone of their lyrics, the bombastic quality of their electronics sequencing, the rawness of their production, and what their name actually means (which is either, Legacy Of Terror In Occupied Nations, or Liquidation Of Targets Is Often Necessary... they kind of use both). It's a handy cipher... that you will find near the end of their 2019 LP, World Wide W.E.B...
Alright, so maybe the third to last track on an LP is, probably, not actually, the most helpful of a place to put an introductory track. Sure, it's needlessly obscured by the prior tracks and place where it is in conformity with some absurdist sense of systemization, but that's also the band's whole deal. Absurdity is as natural to L.O.T.I.O.N. as fatal UI bugs are to most Microsoft products upon launch. But as far as comparisons go, this digital hardcore band is a whole lot less evil than any Seattle-based software company you could name off the top of your head.
L.O.T.I.O.N.is a heavy concept punk band, who relies on schlock '80s pastiche and a dumpster fire aesthetic to call attention to the machinery of empire, and how it is deployed to coerce consent to US global hegemony, both at the frontier of the Empire, and in the interior of the metropole. Also, they sound like HAL from 2001 having violently consensual and emetophilic cybersex with an organic simulation of Alec Empire while they both dry hump an analog drum machine back to its factory presets.
While the lyrics point to real, seemingly intractable problems in the world, the form these issues are presented in is highly satirical. Like on the blast zone battered and hydraulic beat boosted crust punk of "New Prosthetic Metal Arm," where a soldier finds himself stripped of his humanity (and most of his flesh) in the process of him being made into the ultimate killing machine, or "Unsecured Network" where the architects and technicians of the present world order confess their sins over a public wifi signal moments before the civilization they are charged with maintaining is reduced to irradiated charcoal in a nuclear holocaust of their own making. It's enough to make your motherboard feel like it's about to melt into hot silicon slurpy.
I'm almost certain L.O.T.I.O.N.'s won't consider the project a success unless they've given someone an aneurysm, either at one of their shows, or more likely, while listening to this LP. It's also possible that this is not just a desired effect, but a sought-after outcome. Maybe that is the only way to subdue the Empire... to make everyone in America's brain explode.
