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.
