It's unbelievable how some of the numbers off of Postpartum strike me as soaring straight out of a wacky '70s dystopian space-opera. Like, if you can imagine a version of Star Crash, but directed by Brian De Palma, where the incomparable auteur twists the battle beyond the stars into a metaphor about the record industry, but actually, it's about society as a whole, a la Phantom of the Paradise, and the villainous Count Zarth Arn is a metaphor for the spectacle of the commodity fetish of something- that level of wacky dark satire- that's the vibe I get off of Be Kind Cadaver's EP. High camp with a dire message and an impeccable sensibility for adapting the anxieties of modernity into a visage of a tarnished and aesthetically (ab)used future. "A Gentle Stroll Through Modern Britain" opens with strained and tiny cabaret melodies, initially echoing a cursed revisitation to Ziggy Stardust and Spiders from Mars where the promises of youth and redemption have spoiled into a rotten feast of ultra-violence, a harrowing summons of despair heard through the strained hiss of a warped cassette whirling in the deck of a 1958 Plymouth Fury as it cuts through the fog of the night, then narely a warning, and as abruptly as perpendicular traffic careening around a blind corner, the track transitions into a bloody boiling plee to a reversion to sanity, spinning and howling at the peak of abandon with a vaporized Marc Bolan at the helm. The foreboding nightclub act continues as the album rolls into the title track, gripping grooves entreat your frightful obedience as cadaverous sounds are knit and knotted through a mesh of industrial clatter and sparking chord progressions, cutting a ghastly procession through a post-human rave of the digital dead, adorn in raven's down and with a kiss of death upon its lips, lined in black-iron oxide-based-lipstick. "The Centre Won't Hold" rattles the bones of suburbia with frighteningly frank depictions of consumerism recounted in the cadence of a mad deacon's maunder, in harmony with an eruptive trickle and an ominous electronic babble, that spills out over the mix like the overflow from a baptismal font, purifying as it burns with castigating spiritual acid, slowly eating away at the clay feet of the idols we raise to ourselves. The final track, "Pressure to Exist" is appropriately cleansing, easing you in with the verisimilitude of a car radio whose dial is being carelessly flipped before graciously transitioning into an organ lead fête of French-house-styled gothic-disco that eulogizes the persistence of life's contiguousness. I get the sense from the grandly pessimistic, techno-despotic tone of Be Kind Cadaver's post-punk oeuvre that they don't envision a bright future for the human race, but through the portal of Postpartum they reveal in their misery, deadmen can learn to dance when they grow tired of merely shuffling towards judgment day.
You could have it worse than you could have it with Difficult Art And Music.
