Album Review: Rabbit - Halo of Flies

It's genuinely a mark of quality that a band can shift their aesthetic modus operandi between releases and still end up sounding like the same band. In the same way that a stone in a river, surrounded by fresh, flowing water, remains unmoved... or how when you look in the mirror, day after day, it's still you, despite everything. NYC's Rabbit is one of those groups that remains remarkably consistent, despite their restless transformations between releases. Their demo had a crusty Swedish death-thrash feel, while their second EP, Bardo, is such a forcefully streamlined and vicious specimen of melo-death menace that it threatens to tear a whole through reality itself. But for my bottom dollar, their best release so far is their first EP, Halo of Flies. While still very much steeped in a raging conflagration of crust and death metal, there is more of an emphasis on atmosphere, with the band taking the time to stew on some incredibly bleak and turgid grooves while nurturing a fuming aura of deathly psychedelia and psycho-tap shoegaze. It sounds like you are glimpsing someone's mind eat itself while they're in the nth hour of a violent narcotic binge. An unapologetically apocalyptic record that chases a bleeding white hare down a deadman's windpipe to plunge in slow motion into a frozen lake of psycho-reactive bile that's had all the empathy flushed out of it. Like a promise to a dead god in a dying world. Like a rotten egg, pulsating in a chicken's coup, with a red-eyed serpent writhing inside. Halo of Flies is as potent as it is profane. 

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Album Review: Speech Odd - Odd World

God damn, what a nightmare! Not just a nightmare though... a presence. A nightmare that's more a premonition of something powerful and frighteningly imminent crashing through your bedroom ceiling and dragging you to hell with it as it plunged through the floor. Unfamiliar and terrible, but also hypnotically alluring. A rendezvous in the dead of night with a beast who speaks many tounges, none of which have been uttered out loud in the past century, but whose every gesture and pronouncement is intuited just the same- its coat like the plumage of crows, its joins creaking in the cold air, eyes never blinking. It's a truly discordant apparition which mars the senses. Seemingly unknowable, the creature still has a name, Speech Odd. It has swam all the way from Thailand to greet you with bared fangs and open arms. Most alarming is that it is actually a chimera of several tortured varmints, with one named Pam acting as its head, another anointed Bom serving as the heart, and a third called Nampan acting as the limbs. They emerge from the salty break of the ocean under the banner of Odd World to tear up the landscaping and resod it with chaos, dividing with plowshares, sharpened by powerviolence grooves, and ground forward at a pace that is more cutting than spite. Youth crew monks have honed their natural tendency towards barbarity, while demons from grindcore-infested spawn pits have cursed them with a deadly sense of timing and endeavored to wear out their empathy for the human race. It is an odd thing to behold, the on rush of your own doom. With luck, you may take it in stride. 

Album Review: World War IX - Phoning It In

I'm in the right state of mind to be writing about this record, so here goes.* NYC's World War IX is about as blunt as you can get in terms of influences, displaying them proudly like a black eye in the morning after winning a fight with a bouncer the night before. They play mainline, plugin-'n-blitz, early Black Flag-inspired punk and are not shy about it. The kind of stuff that sounds both comic and pissed off in equivalent tonnage. Their EP Phoning It In lifts off in a drunken haze with opener "Fire for Partying" which has a "TV Party" sorta of swing to it with a splash of the reckless, hedonistic chase of the first four OFF! EPs to give the gang-vocal fueled tale of fatuity the punt it requires to turn over into full-on, red-eyed, regretless folly. Two of the three remaining original tracks on the EP deal with the problems of aging men as they drift farther away from their wilder, oat-sowing years. The addiction adage "Coke Machine" is a bumbling, wildly groovy number with some very bossy energy about needing a soda fix to get through the day, while "Portrait Of Sobriety" confronts the listener with the parable of a gentleman who has managed to survive an entire week without a drop of alcohol and now believes he's the visage of Jesus Christ himself in the second coming, a bombastically braggadocious piece with a prickly, blunderbuss flow. The second and final tracks also pair well thematically, wherein the slippery and franticly off-kilter "Larry's House" depicts a neglectful, chaotic environment where teens can chill and get tanked on illicit substances, while the buzzy slug-fest "NYC Tonight," a GG Alin cover, presses the rager the band has built up out into the streets to paint the Big Apple an even darker shade of warm, sticky red. World War IX feels like one of those groups that will always be there- a fact I attribute to their classic compound of influences, as well as their sound, but more so because of how much fun they appear to be having on this record. If I could make a record like this, I don't know that I'd have the motivation to do much else with my life afterward... outside of hitting the studio to pump out another. It seems like some of their members have moved on to other projects for the time being, but I don't think World War IX will ever be gone for good. With how messed up and serious the state of the world is getting by the day, we need their brand of brash jackassery more now than ever to help lighten the mood. 

* I've imbibed close to two liters of beer so far this evening. 

Album Review: Sugaar Pan - Hug A Tree And Burn The Forest

Composer and multidisciplinary, genre-agnostic maven Iker Garmendia presents a peculiar twist on the notion of sacrifice with his album Hug A Tree And Burn The Forest. The concept of a sacrifice is that the gods demand of a community that they give up something of value so that the functional order of the world may be preserved and the people might retain the divine's favor. Although, by the nature of such a gift to the gods, ultimately, one member, or a small group of members within the community, will bear the burden of this offering- a benefit to the many by the loss of a few. Iker turns this around on us. What if those obliged to sacrifice, determined that it was worth seeing the world burn so that an intended offering may be preserved?  What if you allowed an entire forest to char to cinders merely to save one tree? The lonely, winsome paragon of ghostly pan flutes, atonal guitars, super-heated feedback, and resonate throat singing, which Iker delivers on this record, telegraphs a trajectory that traces a discrete path through the bramble of assigned charges and nobel surrender, illustrating an anarchic breaking point with authority and obligation that reveals a certain symptom of liberation, as solitary as it may be. For what is liberty but the love of life, and what is love but the unassailable verdict that the object of one's affection takes precedence over all else? Even if such a choice leaves the world shattered, and its shards scattered like a fist full of sand dropped in the sea.   

Album Review: Possession - Exorkizein

With a band like Belgium's Possession you could easily assume you know what to expect from them, but then I think you'd likely be wrong. Sure, Possession looks like a second-wave black metal band- and they assiduously are- but comprehending a thing is different than experiencing it, and you really do need to experience Exorkizein firsthand. Possession released the record in 2017 as their first LP, and have yet to follow it up with a sequel. Of course, when you nail it on the first try, why take another swing? Especially when the first is still sailing through the air like a lightly singed bat escaping a smoldering belfry. Groups like Bathory cast a long shadow, and Possession certainly has staked out territory in that legend's sinister pall, but beyond the tremendous spin-tingling tremolos and arresting reptilian howls, their dark aura is manifested most potently through the atmosphere they cultivate. It's not a heavy ambiance, like Hooded Menace, but one of brisk peril and bewilderment, conjured by distant maniacal shouts, half-croak incantations, and highly engrossing cutaways that align to impress upon the listener that something truly diabolical is afoot. The album sounds like the arc of an unfolding calamity, baited by hubris and blind avarice. A satanic blaze that consumes a monastery and all its inhabitance as punishment for their transgressions against God and nature in a force majeure of cleansing absolution and exercise by fire- evil feasting upon evil, flame dosing flame, rot cured by conflagration, burning until nothing is left by ash and brittle bones, and the memory of a nightmare that came alive as a warning to all mankind. 

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Interview: Analogue Heart

I experienced a visit with a very friendly ghost in the machine and was able to capture our conversation as a digital recording for your enjoyment and vindication. If you don't already know, Analogue Heart is an anonymous elector-emo artist who combines skramz, midwest emo, and digital collage into a wild tapestry of contemporary sentiment and scrambled nostalgia. We get deep into their latest Lonely Ghost release, User Pleasure Guaranteed, their general motivations and goals for the project, and their thoughts on AI art in DIY spaces. Plug in, tune out, and feel the power! 

Check out the interview here:  

Listen to User Pleasure Guaranteed here: