It's the night before Halloween in the US, and if you're not listening to gammaGIRL's The Cult of Flesh and Blood, then you are not properly prepared for the holiday. There are dark forces at work in this world. Spirits who will turn you into a flapping bag of skin at a glance. Monsters on the prawl, starving and hunting for fresh souls to devour. Maybe you can't feel the battle for survival being waged around you, or perhaps you've already lost, and resigned yourself to your fate. I hope neither is true for you. It would be better if we lived in a world without fear, but alas, such a hope is less potent than the exhale of a daydream. If you must hear the battle cry, my wish is that it resonates within you with the present and ever-enduring cry for preservation that being a living body is the pure and inalienable distillation of. This demand for life and autonomy in the pursuit of one's own ends is often conveyed very physically through heavy metal/hardcore punk, emotionally through emo, and spiritually through electronic dance music. As it were, gammaGIRL's The Cult of Flesh and Blood is the unity of all three. The album unleashes its first of many immodest but indisputably defiant summons with the ripping "Scream (Bloody Murder)," a gory, monstrosity that opens at a rushing pace, like an avalanche of lava and enmity spilling down the side of a mountain, before settling into a surfy, Code Orange-esque, discordant arrangement of wiggling, tentacle armed grooves and werewolf girl howls. The following track makes use of a deep-fried drum machine pattern as the crusty floor for an aggravated, supersaturated and seriously danceable bass groove that thunders above a stratum of desolate crying souls and their arid, longing whispers. "Sister Killer" combines the distorted jungle conflagration of Atari Teenage Riot with the melodramatic whip and lamentful holler of My Chemical Romance as it splashes unconcernedly in a fit of pain and ecstasy in an open pool of glowing toxic waste and running, black eyeliner. The mood becomes more personable and inviting with "Gay Sex Collective," where MidWest powerpop grooves hook up with MidWest emo buzz-chords out back behind the dumpsters for an explicate, adult encounter. Dreamy shades of the Cure emerge through the drizzling streaks of the dark and dripping crimson clash of "Fake Blood," and the intertwining of moments of Glen Danzig's vocal inflections into the unrepentant and decadent spoils of what is essentially a horror punk version of an Elliot Smith song on "Potter's Field" is a trick worthy of a High Priestess of a witch's coven. Sometimes to defeat monsters, you have to become a different kind of beast altogether, and on The Cult of Flesh and Blood, gammaGIRL is, without a doubt, a new kind of monster, one that fights the best way it knows how: by singing its revenge in to the night.
