It's an unusual flex to include the word "orange" in the title of your album. Popular lyricism is often defined by simple and memorable rhyming schemes, and "orange" is famously refractory in this respect. It's also a color with little obvious thematic or emotional currency. Unlike red, which can represent high emotions like anger or love, or yellow, which can be associated with both hope and health as well as cowardice and sickness, orange doesn't benefit from any of these correlations. It's sort of an abstract-neutral. Not red. Not yellow. Not hot or cold. Existing in a state of perpetual separation and obstinance. Maybe this is why experimental duo Macula Dog have chosen it for the title of a song about chemical addiction, a song that shares the title for their second LP, Orange 2. Dependencies of all kinds, chemical or otherwise, can result in a serious diminishment of one's quality of life, and once established, might never let go of you. Like a steady and recurring cancer of the spirit. A squatter who has adversely possessed a plot of your personhood. A devil in a dugout on your shoulder. Only for Macula Dog, they're not subordinate to vices, so much as a volitionally crooked muse. An insistent imp that fixes them into their keyboards like a backward screw, always catching and tearing at their surroundings. The bizarreness of their approach is reflected back at the listener from the very start, with the title track, where you will encounter something of an IV drip of mashing pulpy bass and rung-out acidic grooves that disintegrates before your eyes, broken and distributed in a rotating tempest as if they were sugar cubes stirred into a hot cup of tea. The song keeps itself together, but just barely, limping and tripping over aluminum-tinted percussion as it's punctured by thumb-tack-shaped sparks of electro-detritus. Its existence is not so much a struggle as a bafflement- surviving not to thrive but to spite the idea of surrender. The dialectical ends of its will and capitulating tendencies swallowing each other in a double-headed ouroboros helix. Breaking down only to sprout and die again, like changeling mushrooms bursting through a peat of immaculate dry rot. It's not just the title track either; Orange 2 is simply able to live within the blunt discomfort of its own skin while undergoing a chilling remodeling procedure with each song, where its bones and joints are continuously pulled asunder and rearranged into hostile architecture. A number like "I Love It," resembles the reshuffling of Oh No! It's Devo, cut into angular jigsaw pieces and assembled blindly according to texture and shape, while "Half Cycle" inverts the sonic accompaniment of a planetarium's midday laser show so that twinkling synth riffs and spasming guitar solos jut out of the atmosphere like pillars of sun flare, preventing the earth from collapsing into the sky. There is a homely sort of drunkness to the vocal performance of the band as well that is augmented by oscillating vocal filters- affective digital alterations that can't settle on a cadence but seem to be so overwhelmed by their own woozy, contrarian crapulence that they carry on anyway. There are hints here and there that Macula Dog were truly attempting to make concessions to pop accessibility on tracks like "Plastic Wrap" with firm, rolling melodies, as well as on the soundcard shredder "Go Green," but they couldn't restrain themselves from vandalizing every utterance as it ushered forth from their combined efforts, in much the same manner that a fun house mirror can't help but reflect a repulsively cartoonish impression of the things that stand before it, or much in the way that a scorpion will always murder its ferry frog while forging a river, Macula Dog can't be anything other than their mutinous selves. It's this inclination toward a perverse form of revelry and squinting self-actuation that lends to "Neosporin" the bludgeoning essence of splattering concrete, or "Smart Man Do" its savant-like dislocated acuity for rhythm, where its pairing of beats and vocals come to resemble Invader Zim's Gir after he's been chopped and gutted and reborn as a talking drum machine. If there is a line of restraint, they will cross it. As a result, Orange 2 is almost too original for its own good. But it is good. Because of, not despite, its indiscrete obtuseness, a quality that comes as close to charming as anything generally indigestible can.
