Album Review: Hand Model - Will Life Reign Supreme Even In Death

I've tried to not see myself in the scratchy black absence occupying the center of Hand Model's Will Life Reign Supreme Even In Death cover art. I've tried but I've failed. In general, I don't have a depressive outlook on life, but I have to admit that sometimes the general ebb and flow can leave me with the impression that I'm a passive observer in my own existence. Like a pebble imbued in the sandy bottom of a river, the days trickle past like a wild, clear shadow. Yet, there I lay. Unmoved, unscathed, and uninvolved. I get the sense that the artist behind this record feels somewhat the same. At the center of Hand Model we find Ignat Frege, one half of the duo Wreck and Reference, and on the whole, a master at replicating the tortured patterns of a certain cursed and destitute variety of ennui. While bright infusions of synth tickle and taunt the senses, and babbling undulations of bass crush and cudgel the mind, Ignat's voice and verse remain flat, detached and distant- a residue in the shape of a man, stained on the fabric of reflection as a regression into regret. Amongst the lush, cold atmosphere of Will Life Reign Supreme Even In Death, Ignat embodies an impoverished state of affairs- wrapped by comforts he feels constricted, sorting through small luxuries they turn to brittle clay shards in his hands, present at a grand banquet he drags his belly across the floor half-starved. His tongue like sandpaper, his fingers wrapped in 4 layers of latex, his eyes plucked out for his own piece of mind. In this assortment of abstract prose and a bleeding spray of nausea-inducing electronics, we find a modern subject who haunts his own home and is a stranger to his own will, to the ability to grasp satisfaction. A futile monument to a Faustian delima- an exchange where absolute opulence is offered at the price of a purgatory of passive indignation. Dying to die for something. The exit is itself a harsh sanction. A Sisyphean exercise in un-undertaking. A long march to push a bolder out from the entrance of one's cradle-tomb. A deliberate claiming of a life that is more than a prolonged phase of paralysis. If only to prove that there is some agency still manifest in the human soul. 

Embrace your fate with The Flenser.  

Album Review: Generifus - Rearrangel

That "Biblically Accurate Angel" meme from a few years back was funny, wasn't it? Macros of arcane-looking figures, or some MC Escher-looking hemorrhoid, or a face with too many eyeballs dropping into your timeline unannounced to create a contrast with the soft, approachable portrayals of angels your grandmother preferred. The joke required you to view spirituality, especially the Abrahamic variety, as fundamentally alien. Thereby causing any alarming depiction of a Biblical character to appear more real to you than whatever comfort the graying matriarch of your family may have drawn from images of holy messengers that fall far short of nourishing your nightmares. But what line are those angels famous for dropping when they barge in on your life with a DM from the big man? Something like, "Be Not Afraid?" Sounds like they want you to have a normal one and not get all hung up on their looks. There is a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe more than one. Such as it's not how someone looks but what they have to say that is important. Even if that someone is a transcendent being, who is unperturbed by the way their body defies the laws of physics. Another important takeaway is that it's ok to take comfort from unusual sources. For instance, I did not expect to enjoy Generifus's album Rearrangel as much as I did, and I think one of the things that made it so enjoyable is how much I felt like I could relax while it was spinning. The Olympia artist has a truly enduring ability to embody the familiar in his original music in a way that makes it feel like it has always kind of been around- watching you, guarding you, making sure you didn't get into the wrong types of mischief, but most of all making you feel at ease. He has a swaying kind of lilt to his vocal delivery that leans heavily into a reedy drawl wetted with a honeyed dew. The whimsy of folk harmonies that are layered throughout Rearrangel balances the scales with pop-psych permutations and indie rock optimism like a feather weighed against a blameless soul. It stirs up vessels of Kurt Vile with a base of refreshing and lightly carbonated K Records drafts to keep you in a flow of evanescence, like you are always breathing in fresh mountain air, even in the depth of a muggy city night. It's uncanny how this record snuck up on me. I wasn't looking for it, and yet it found me. But more importantly, it has reached me like a tiding of joy from a benevolent and kindly source, one located in the warm cockle of another human heart. It's a record written from a perch of positivity that permits one to see the farthest extent of creation and know that it is good. I don't need to be afraid. I just need to move some things around so that I can fit more of Rearrangel into my life. 

Grab it from Anything Bagel or Bud Tapes (I don't have a preference). 

Album Review: birds fear death - livestream death compilation

Electronic punk/emo project birds fear death does not seem to fear annihilation. It's not something the project's creative lead Kelly Wilhite appears keen on avoiding... At least not aesthetically. Kelly's latest release under this nomdeplume is livestream death compilation, a provocatively, Live Leak-inspired title whose opening track "pretty girl snuff film" articulates acts of self-mutilation before ending with several repetitions of the blunt coda, "kill yourself." It's edgy. No question. It might even hew too closely to the confessions of a mall goth for some, but it's consistent enough quality-wise to be taken seriously, in my opinion. Most of the project's songs deal in some manner or another with self-inflicted harm, death, feelings of desperation, longing for negation, and general petitions to a waiting void. This subject matter is a common, binding thread that winds across all three of birds fear death's releases, and livestream death compilation is no exception. This isn't unusual stuff for young people to write about. Especially not since the internet became a widely available amenity of American family life. Lots of kids post through their pain late at night after their parents have gone to bed. Flying tear-soaked paper airplanes, brimming with the marrow of their angst, into the black, starving sun of the information super-hell portal. If anyone granted half the things my younger self wrote in my LiveJournal with any level of validity I'd probably still be under observation in a mental health facility somewhere. birds fear death are particularly adept at capturing this sense of inescapable anguish that people tend to experience in the springtime of their lives, as well as the moods and measures that it might drive them towards. While suicide isn't a new or unusual topic in punk and emo music, I have yet to encounter a project that approaches the matter in the way that this one does. An undaunted flirtation with the actual act and its consequences which still retains enough of a sense of humor and even irony about itself to ease the imminent horror of its implications. A dare to grasp the absurdist detachment and guffaw at what a thin white envelope addressed to friends and family and left on the mantelpiece might imply. A penchant for DSBM production crossed with Myspace-era gothic Romanticism that integrates crusty acoustic punk, Alkaline Trio traipsing melodicism, and a cracked approach to electronic music sequencing that sounds like it's oozed from an abscess in Alice Glass's cranial cavity. It all wafts through the senses like the smell of burning plastic exuded by a decades-old laptop whose exhaust fan has given up the ghost. It's dark but not without a sense of self-awareness. And while I don't doubt that some of the bereaved notions expressed here are genuine, they're never presented without a sense of aspiration for renewal. It anticipates that daisies will sprout from our graves and is warmed by the knowledge that the sun will continue to shine even after we as individuals have passed under the shrowd of an eternal night. It appears to me that birds fear death doesn't aim to alienate themselves or others with their music, but rather to throw open the shutters and let light shine in on uncomfortable, taboo, and pain-riddled subjects in order to show that none of us suffer in as much isolation as we might think. Either that or their brain has been totally melted by exposure to simulated snuff videos and shock content posted anonymously to deep web forums. You'll have to judge for yourself, but I think there is real merit in what they are doing here. 

Album Review: The Cowboys - Sultan of Squat

In this house, we believe the '70s were a time when people still had style. In this house, we also believe that the '70s produced some of history's greatest and longest-lasting songs. In this house, we believe a man's merit is inversely measured by the ratio of the length of his mustache and the length of the sleeves on his workshirt. In this house, we believe that Rock 'n Roll will never die. In this house, we believe that Baseball is, in fact, America's greatest pastime (and an excellent excuse to get bombed before 2 in the afternoon on a weekday). You may recall that it was common for Americans, once upon a time, to display their sincerest beliefs in the form of proclamatory placards prominently placed on their lawns. I am never one for following trends, but Indiana's The Cowboys have inspired me to step outside my independence streak and share some of the gems plucked from my own philosophical treasure chest. If you want to know what I think keeps this country great: it's brews, beards, bad-ass guitars, and huge, pendulous (base)balls.  All kidding aside, I am heartened to hear the genuine and pretensless nature of The Cowboy's sixth LP Sultan of Squat, a kind of tribute to a distant era of sound that revels in its trash as well as its triumphs. In songwriting terms as well as style and content, the group performs in the pocket of low-glimmer glam and garage flare, which reflects the blunted twinkle and grounded rumble of post-psychedelic power-pop, a combination of sounds that was endemic to like a three-year period before punk took over as the standard bearer of any ramshackle, rowdy, and left-of-the-dial rock formation. The album presents a digest of portraits, neatly drawn depictions of people living their lives, unassuming of their ends, existing in the moment and largely unaware of the calamity dangling over their heads like a glinting blade. The opener and title track is emblematic of the mix of style and substance, offering a ragtime jaunt and bobbing blunder-hop, where baseball metaphors and cribbed passages from "The Star-Spangled Banner" wrap around each other like the ends of an old rubber hose around a bicep, or the binds of a nose, to depict the downfall of a hometown hero, devoured by the dragon of addiction. Elsewhere, hearts break in-twine on the twanging bend and bane of "She's Not Your Baby Anymore," after which you're invited on a rolling tour of harmonic grandeur that greets you in unassumingly somber tones on "Goetta Fest Calamity Song," a little later the band bears underground and unearths a semblance of the rollicking rockabilly that would inspire some of the Clash's most memorable tunes on "Johnny Drives A Beater," while nearing the finish line, a Walker-esque waltz skips through operatic undertow which gift a splash of splendor to scenes cut from the dating lives of doped up office drones surviving in the digital-trenches and avoiding the death beam of HR's ever-present gaze.  With Sultan of Squat, The Cowboys are able to clip through all the anxious pretext of modern music and hone in on a very specific, foundational, and damb-near-ancient styles of powerpop in such a relaxed and candid manner that it almost feels like they're reinventing (or at least reinvigorating) the genre with every distorted strum of their guitar. A serious feat when most of the originators of these sounds are either dead or in hospice. It's a testament to persistence, perseverance, and passion, as six albums into their career, The Cowboys can take something old and recast it in a new mold, while embuing it with a blazing spark equivalent to that of batter popping a fly into the floodlights above the field and showered the seats below in a rain of golden fire. 

Catch the vibe with Feel It Records.

Album Review: DJ Unknown - Prisoners of Gravity

DJ solo records must be an easy sell. Every beatmaker has a bushel of material just lying around their hard drive. Good work, usually with sturdy bones, and inspired by degree, but languishing derelict in a state of rough repose. Pitching these loops to their friends is a good way of creating the conditions necessary to drag some of them across the finish line. They pitch some beats, their friends like them, those friends drop some bars, they polish the product and ship. Their fans buy it. The MC's friends buy it. DJ wins. MC wins. Fans win. Everyone feels like they get a little something for themselves. However, Canadian spindoctor Dj Unknown's third solo LP feels more intentional than the ram-shackle process I've described. Prisoners of Gravity doesn't give off the impression that it is limited by any mundane considerations of shoveling out a product or giving one's friends something to call up their press agent about. Every track feels crafted in a conscious manner to elevate the character of the MC's flow and approach. I'm fresh to all of these rhyme-misters and yet after hearing the dystopic "Stranger Than Fiction" and the Shaolin stalk of "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars" (just by way of example), I feel like I could hold down a decent conversation with either Noah23 and Raz Fresco if I were to run into them at a bar somewhere. Noah23 with his deep-cut sci-fi references, and Raz with his guarded confessional mantras, offer me insights into their minds and personalities while decisively demonstrating their skills as genuine people as well as warriors school in the cutting quality of a well-turned phrase. The soulful, ruminative and delicately calibrated production provided by Dj Unknown allows each number on this album to become a personal statement by the guest artist while showing off the clear extent of the care with which he prusues in his craft. Neither Dj Unknown nor his collaborators are confined by any of the material they approach on this record short of the outer limits of their own imaginations. 

Distributed by Urbnet.